NYC's Psychedelic Film and Music Festival Returns for 7th Annual Event

The Psychedelic Film and Music Festival is set to return for its seventh year on December 14, 2024, at the Producers Club Theaters in Midtown Manhattan. This unique event will feature an eclectic mix of independent films, music videos, post-screening discussions, and a stage production that integrates audience participation in a therapeutic experience.

The festival, founded and directed by Daniel Abella, focuses on exploring themes of inspiration, healing, and altered states of consciousness. “Psychedelic practices such as botanicals, meditation, and music help us break free from the confines of rigid thought patterns,” said Abella. The curated film lineup includes surreal visuals, abstract storytelling, and explorations of mindfulness.

A highlight of this year’s festival is the stage play Timothy X’s Journey from PTSD to Wholeness, which delves into the experiences of a combat veteran in therapy. The production invites the audience to participate in an actual therapy session, emphasizing the event’s focus on personal growth and healing.

Music also plays a key role, with Abella describing it as “the gold standard for accessing altered states of consciousness.” Through its multifaceted programming, the festival seeks to foster a deeper connection between creativity, mindfulness, and well-being.

Block 1: Shades of Psychedelia
12:00PM – 3:00PM EST

Breaking Out
Director David Glass
United States, 6 min
Breaking Out” is centered around a tumultuous piano improvisation David Glass recorded several years ago. The short film is a psychological rollercoaster containing a variety of footage that express a wide range of intense emotions and strong forces of nature, and yet there is a beauty to the chaos. As in a ballet, the music is in synchronicity with the dramatic.

The Sun is Always Shining
Director Claudia Bicen
United States, 3 min
The Sun is Always Shining is a short hand-drawn animation where Dr Dan Brown, Tibetan Buddhist scholar and Harvard clinical psychologist, discusses the nature of awareness and self.

Haven
Director Alison Chang
Taiwan, 6 min
“HAVEN”, is an experimental film that delves into the visualization of human emotions, focusing on the journey from anxiety to self-reconciliation. It portrays the protagonist’s escape from Plato’s allegorical cave into a three-tiered structure within a fallen angel, symbolizing the blend of mind and body, and concludes in a tranquil forest symbolizing inner peace.

Et Ignis Involvens
Director Joao Pedro Oliveira
Portugal, 11 min
This video is inspired on the first vision of the prophet Ezechiel (Ezechiel 1:4):
“et vidi et ecce ventus turbinis veniebat ab aquilone et nubes magna et ignis involvens et splendor in circuitu eius et de medio eius quasispecies electri id est de medio ignis”
“And I looked, and behold, a whirlwind came out of the north, a great cloud, and a fire infolding itself; and a brightness was about it, and out of the midst thereof as the colour of amber, out of the midst of the fire.”

Les Bêtes
Director Michael Granberry
United States, 12 min
A mysterious rabbit with a set of magic keys summons a host of strange creatures to entertain a wicked king and his decadent court in this dark stop-motion animated fantasy inspired by the works of Ladislas Starevich.

The Dissolution of the Landscape
Director Anne-Marie Bouchard
Canada, 22 min
Through visual metaphors, the film offers an incursion into an inner landscape, a dive into subconscious, a mix of childhood memories and recurrent dreams, between surrealism and automatism.

Can We Really Know Anything About Carrots?
Director Scott Bateman
United States, 5 min
An artificial intelligence asks the Big Questions in this animated film featuring AI-generated art, script, music, and narration.

Mamaicha, Pretty Much
Director Noah Frech
Germany, 7 min
“A lover’s dance weaves through a kaleidoscope of dreams where fate unfolds in shifting, spectral visions.”

Profane Riddles
Director Nick Didkovsky
United States. 4 min
Tiles of images taken from obsessively micro-detailed art are arranged in concentric patterns that seem to crawl. Enigmatically embroidered electric guitar provides the music.

Elegy in Light
Director Zareh Tjeknavorian
Armenia, 11 min
Elegy in Light”, shot on super 8mm film at the funeral of Catholicos Vazgen I, Supreme Patriarch of All Armenians, depicts an ancient and rarely seen rite of the Armenian Church with the sound of monastic ritual chant: an experience described by one viewer as “a psychedelic trip into medieval times.”

Mariposas
Director Adrian Carey
United States, 3 min
Set in a universe of magical realism, a boastful father prattles on superficially about his daughter to another parent in the school pick up line, but is unable to perceive her when it matters most.

Demi-Demons
Director Martin Gerigk
Germany, 18 min
Demi-Demons is an essay film about the contradictions of contemporary existence, which separate us from our natural instincts, opening abysses within us. The glorification of the hermaphrodite, the hedonism of virtual realities, the search for new levels of physical attraction and forms of higher consciousness, ambivalence towards sexual reproduction, these abysses embody the existential struggles inherent in navigating the terrain between instinct and enlightenment in a rapidly evolving world.

Block 2: Documentary Presentation
1:00PM – 3:00PM EST

Life and Breath
Director Mustapha Khan
United States, 75 min
A new documentary exploring Holotropic Breathwork, LIFE AND BREATH takes us into an extraordinary group Breathwork session in Vermont, where an eclectic collection of scholars, artists and dreamers are instructed to simply: “Breathe until you are surprised.

Block 3: Documentary Presentation
2:00PM – 4:00PM EST

Ayahuasca Now
Director Carlos Cejas
Producer Mario Jorge Stecher
Argentina, 90 min
A powerful documentary about a group of men and women veterans from Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan wars. Feeling trapped by their suffering and misunderstood by those around them, they embark on a journey to the Amazon jungle in search of one last chance at redemption. Just voices of a silent war.

Block 4: Stage Play
4:00PM – 5:00PM EST

Timothy X’s Journey from PTSD To Wholeness
Director/Writer: Dan Abella
This play is a reenactment of a session with an Afghanistan war veteran, and explores the nature of PTSD and Survivor’s guilt.

Block 5: Documentary Presentation (2nd Screening)
5:00PM – 7:00PM EST

Block 6: The Search For Transcendence
7:00PM – 8:30PM EST

Liminal Space: Diving Within
Director Anahita Safarnejad Choobary
Germany, 20 min
A poetic exploration of a father-daughter relationship. Anahita grows up in front of her father’s camera. A dreamy life fulfilled with love and poetry evolves into a nightmare in which she witnesses her identity get lost as her father dies of cancer. In her quest to understand death, she dives into a rollercoaster ride of unknown emotions and embarks on a voyage of acceptance. From death into an immortal world.

TV Madness
Submitter Michael Bohacz
United States, 3 min

This Moment in Time – Song
Submitter Tom Ryan
United States, 4 min

Santo Daime
Director Luigi Cazzaniga
United States, 12 min
A movie about the making of Ayahuasca by the Santo Daime people in the Amazons.

Chromatic Symphony
Director Hüseyin Mert Erverdi
Turkey, 2 min
In Chromatic Symphony (2023), the colors embark on a journey, seeking to illuminate the world and fill it with their vibrant presence. Meanwhile, the enigmatic black forms, dance and weave through the canvas. The chase between the colors and darkness unfolds in a series of rapidly cut, abstract images that evolve into complex be layered compositions.

Money, Fascism, and some sort of Acid
Director Janek Ambros
United States, 30 min
A collection of five short films tackling the military industrial complex, the rise of fascism, political polarization and various issues in modern society.

Clockwork Fold
Director Malte F Bartels
Germany, 2 min
Music: The minimalistic track “Clockwork” by The Careless Responders
Video: The analog Film FOLD by Malte Bartels, showing a paper boat being folded

Fixing a Hole #2
Director Pierre Ajavon
France, 6 min
By trying to fix a hole to stop our mind from wandering on the other side…
“Fixing a Hole” uses my own lunar films mixed with an experimental electronic music composition including NASA lunar sound recordings.

Magic Mushroom
Directors Jiaxun Xie, Bo Wang
United States, 10 min
Jayce, a young man, shares a dwelling with his landlord. A sexual encounter, coupled with psychedelic drugs, immerses the viewer into alternative worlds of fragmented memory. Suddenly engulfed in panic, Jayce runs for his life, trying to find his way back home.

Block 7: The Fantastical, The Surreal, The Bizarre
8:30PM – 10:00PM EST

Mombomb, Part I
Director Patricia Beckmann Wells
United States, 5 min
Pez sees life through fairy tales while serial killers hunt her. Mombomb explores intergenerational trauma and memory through the eyes of the daughter of WWII immigrants.

Crazy Crabs from Outer Space
Director Magdaleena Jakkila
Finland, 22 min
Pirjo, still stuck in her past, gets kidnapped by her pet crab Sebastian who turns out to be an alien. Sebastian wants to save her since the world is about to end at 10 o’clock today. However, Pirjo refuses to leave the planet without a memento of her beloved Ester and Sebastian won’t leave without Pirjo. The clock is ticking.

The Aesthete
Directors Kaylan Jordan-Sen, Ian Sen
United Kingdom, 20 min
The Aesthete is a psychedelic horror film with a sting in its tail. Horror elements aside, it deals with themes of dangerous art, drug use, manipulation, the nature of loneliness and alienation as experienced by the outsider, the things we will believe when truly desperate…and the possibility, perhaps, of transcendence.

Routine
Director Russ Emanuel
United States, 3 min
During a mysterious pandemic, Cassie’s quarantine life has turned into a routine, day in and day out. Nothing new seems to happen, until she realizes she’s out of coffee. And she’s determined to get her cup of joe, even if she must face the horrors of the outside world. Because “she’d kill for a cup of coffee.”

Leaf Man
Director Kevin Ackley
United States, 20 min
Leaf Man is a metaphysical monster movie following a man’s odyssey through a world of organic existential transformations. With momentum from a powerful shoegaze score, this wordless short film uses surreal and strange dual-roled characters to dance through the boundary between ourselves, our surroundings, and each other, in the search for a meaningful life

Bay for Blood
Director Harry Waldman
United States, 18 min
James and Rob are hiding out in isolation to fix their mutual issues. As time progresses, the two reveal facts regarding their disturbing past relationship. An acquaintance of James’, Jessica, finds herself in an uncomfortable position as she contemplates the best way to handle the situation.

The Double Room
Director Martin Del Carpio
United States, 15 min
Honor, both an artist and dreamer, finds himself in a dystopian reality of the corporate world. Having to face himself, his choice remains in whether to give in for the sake of survival or exist independently from what our culture has conditioned us to accept.

Circology
Director Tero Peltoniemi
Finland, 10 min
Set in a universe of magical realism, a boastful father prattles on superficially about his daughter to another parent in the school pick up line, but is unable to perceive her when it matters most.

Feedback
Director Xavier Coleman
United States, 15 min
Desperate for a respite from the city and his computer screen, NYC transplant, Evan, sets out on a camping getaway with encouragement from his AI therapist. He soon meets the campground’s renter, Sydney. With her guidance, the two decide to indulge in a rare strain of psychedelic mushrooms. What begins as an escapist meet-cute slowly devolves into a visceral nightmare, as the boundaries between the virtual and the physical begin to melt.

Player One Ready
Director Stefanie Clare Neal
Australia, 5 min
It explores the concept of simulated reality through a narrative journey, beginning with a lullaby that embodies blissful ignorance – subtly disrupted by audio-visual ‘glitches’ hinting at a deeper truth.

Block 8: Psych-Horror Feature Presentation
10:00PM – 11:30PM EST

Tie Die
Director Morgan Miller
United States, 80 min
When a series of mangled bodies begin appearing in the park, Ranger Jones (Lloyd Kaufman, President of Troma Entertainment and creator of the Toxic Avenger) and a state trooper (Joe Bob Briggs, Shudder’s The Last Drive In) are baffled by the attacks.

Block 9: Midnight Psychedelic Feature
11:30PM – 1:00AM EST

Yellow Margarine
Director Ryoto Akaike
Japan, 100 min
The film is about 10 characters who are “someone/something like” (who are something like a nerd, something like a girlfriend, something like an action hero, something like a yakuza and so on), exploring themselves in the interaction with each others in the imaginary small town.It describes their uniqueness, loneliness, struggles, affection.

Tickets and passes for the event are available at psychedelicfilmandmusicfestival.com.