TILT-SHIFT, referring to a pair of interactions between a camera lens and the image plane, is a film series about moving images and politics. TILT-SHIFT invites guest filmmakers to screen their work alongside a film that helped inspire it, and discuss with audiences how their work connects to longer lineages of radical cinema and anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist struggle. Curated by UCSC Film and Digital Media PhD. student alex cruse, this series intends to connect conversations about aesthetics and form to work being done on the ground.

In September, TILT-SHIFT welcomes filmmaker Matte Hewitt for an advanced screening and discussion of Shimmering (2025), and Flying Jewels (2024). These short, experimental documentaries emerge from years of field work and intensive research into how US military technology, Indigenous knowledge systems, and local ecology come together in the figure of the hummingbird.

Hewitt's films will be presented before Harun Farocki's Eye/Machine II (2002) and Sky Hopinka's Dislocation Blues (2017), two works that also consider state violence, optics, and sovereignty. An audience conversation will follow.

Special thanks to Sky Hopinka and Antje Ehmann/Harun Farocki GbR