31ST ANNUAL CUCALORUS FILM FESTIVAL
presents
Paradoxical Frog Shorts
THU · NOVEMBER 20 · 2025 · 4:00 PM · THALIAN BLACK
Paradoxical Frog Shorts
Thursday / 4:00 PM / Thalian Black
Saturday / 1:30 PM / Jengo’s Playhouse
82 minutes
Nature, memory, and art collide as filmmakers excavate meaning from what’s been lost, layered over, or left behind. Visually rich and deeply reflective, they reveal how time reshapes both the world around us and the worlds within.
8 Seconds at the Three Sisters
Director: André Silva / 19:40
Producer: Shannon Silva
A filmmaker canoes up North Carolina’s Black River to the Three Sisters Swamp, chasing light through ancient bald cypress groves. What begins as a familiar act of observation and recording takes an uncanny turn. Using past footage and sound, the film reconstructs what was seen, what was heard—and what cannot be explained.
SKRFF
Directors: Corrie Francis Parks, Daniel Nuderscher / 7:00
A 40-year-old graffiti wall becomes an archaeological site and a sgraffito sculpture as long-gone layers of paint are uncovered and transformed into fireworks of color and shape. The combination of stop motion animation with visceral sounds compresses decades of artistic, political, and cultural expression into a new audio-visual dimension. Driven by frustration with the global rise of toxic ideologies, the artists created this street art metaphor in an earnest attempt to know and understand the past and the present.
A nature documentary: Elements of Decomposition
Director: Clay Scofield / 5:10
A nature documentary: elements of decomposition plays with transformations through redefinition of language: elements of composition are reinvented through slippage and sculptural activation as methods of meaning-making through accumulation and decay.
I Really Wanted to Love Today
Director: Russell Sheaffer / 14:10
Producer: Hannah McSwiggen
A parent and child’s camping trip to an uninhabited, seagull-ridden island turns into a tense, metaphysical journey. As the trip deteriorates, both are forced to examine their own animalistic impulses.
Guadalupe Maravilla's Mariposa Relámpago
Director: César Martínez Barba / 13:31
Producer: Art21
Glowing softly in the West Texas desert night, artist Guadalupe Maravilla’s “Mariposa Relámpago” was once an ordinary school bus, but is now a richly decorated, mobile site for remembrance and healing. This short documentary interweaves the bus’s journey and the artist’s journey to the United States as an unaccompanied, undocumented minor fleeing civil war in El Salvador in the 1980s into a poetic reflection of trauma, memories, and healing.
Busy Bodies
Director: Kate Renshaw-Lewis / 5:42
Producer: Eric Ackerman
Busy Bodies is a hand-drawn animation that combines inkjet and screen printing techniques. Inspired by Rube Goldberg machines, the film explores the undisclosed production journey of easily disposable objects. The images of the film cycle and deteriorate, visualizing the repetition, speed, and destructive nature of the factory method supply chain.
Wilmington NC
Director: Alec Gessert / 16:53
Aesthetics of the everyday captured in Wilmington North Carolina. A diary film of love and the emotions people feel while searching for their life's purpose.
