Director: Ryan Swartzlander

Bio: I’m an experimental filmmaker with a background in photography and music performance and production.  I’ve been interested in the visual arts since working at a photo lab during college in the late 90s, but I really started taking it seriously around 2013, when I started shooting fashion and commercial photography and video as a side gig. While it’s always been in the back of my head that someday this will all lead to making movies, it was during COVID that I started looking more seriously into the idea of creating short films.  And I’ve been focusing on moving in that direction ever since.  

Stylistically, I am drawn to striking imagery that has a certain aesthetic charisma and uniqueness, often even a strangeness that delves into surrealism.  It’s not always necessarily about making obvious sense, although I have recently been venturing more in the direction of creating narrative films – within the context of those striking visuals, of course.  I really enjoy finding/creating that magic of taking a series of visuals that, individually, don’t necessarily make sense and might even be from completely unrelated situations, but in the context of the series, coalesce to tell a story or evoke a certain emotion in an unexpected and visually interesting way.  Although I realize we are in an age of constant bombardment with formulaic montage, even getting to the point of algorithmically-generated, real-time reels, I feel there is still much to be explored in it as an art form.

e where through careful curation new visions can be realized.

Film: A short dive into a surreal circus world of color, fire, mirrors and aerial performance.