“What would another world look like, one that is carried by this feeling of empathy, of mutual love between humans and animals, between species? How would our relationship with a largely domesticated nature and environment change? How would established relationships of power and strength be redefined with this thought?”—Tasja Langenbach.

Here Is Everything (2013, 15 min) presents itself as a message from The Future, as narrated by a cat and a rabbit, spirit guides who explain that they’ve decided to speak to us via a contemporary art video because they understand this to be our highest form of communication. Their cheeky introduction, however, belies the complex set of ideas that fill the remainder of the film. Death, God, and attaining and maintaining a state of Grace are among the thematic strokes winding their way through the piece, rapturously illustrated with animation, still and video imagery.

It is a work that contains specific details about its themes, but sufficiently ambiguous and free of dogma, including religious dogma that, our futuristic visitors explain, is a vestigial leftover from an earlier phase of evolution. And while Death is an ever-present rumination, so are Redemption, Affirmation, and Possibility.

Fourteen year old bone collector Maxine Rose is looking for validation from her heroes. These include primatologist Jane Goodall, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and New Zealand teen pop star Lorde.

Fourteen year old bone collector Maxine Rose is looking for validation from her heroes. These include primatologist Jane Goodall, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and New Zealand teen pop star Lorde.

Fourteen year old bone collector Maxine Rose is looking for validation from her heroes. These include primatologist Jane Goodall, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and New Zealand teen pop star Lorde.

The Infernal Grove is an unsystematic structural analysis of drug use, addiction and recovery (not necessarily in that order). It is anti-carceral, anti-prohibition and seeks to amplify the voices of radical harm-reductionists and their coalitions.

Lesser Apes tells the story of a love affair between a primatologist, Farrah and a female bonobo ape, Meema. Bonobos are the species with which humans share the most DNA, but unlike our species, they are matriarchal, live without conflict, and are unabashedly sexual. A paean to perversion, the film combines animation, live action and song to challenge attitudes about sex, language and our relationship to nature.

Funny, touching and ambitious in scope, Bad Ideas continues to deal with many of the themes addressed in Duke and Battersby’s earlier works: addiction, spirituality, identity, relationship dynamics and the ongoing quest for joy.

In The Fine Arts, Emily Vey Duke and Cooper Battersby mock their own lack of inspiration: a woman confesses that she’s speaking French in the nude because she has no good ideas but admits that her solution is unoriginal. "I hate the fine arts, I am disgusted by the fine arts, because, um, the fine arts are always made with artifice."

Based on dreams (waking and non-waking) by pals and acquaintances of noted American writer Lucy Corin, the night after the epochal US election of 2016. A bevy of speakers weigh in on the new world.