Now Instant and the Los Angeles Festival of Movies present PART-TIME, a collection of new moving image works drawn from the worlds of fine art, experimental film, and narrative cinema that impel the structural capacities of the form. 2026’s iteration of PART-TIME features films from Abdellah Taïa, Kim Torres, Neo Sora, Mungo Thomson, Sara Magenheimer, Michael Bell-Smith, Kevin Jerome Everson, Claudrena N. Harold, Basma Al-Sharif, Adam Piron, Colectivo Los Ingrávidos, and Suneil Sanzgiri. Taken together, the works locate gestures of intimacy that map the inextricable entanglement of private tragedy, political struggle, and the moving image.

January 2007. I am back to Cairo. For Work. You have changed your phone number, Omar. I must find you. I love you… Abdellah

Through the quiet rhythms of everyday life and her imagination, Chunyan drifts between two worlds—her hometown of Enping, China, and her new home in Manzanillo, on Costa Rica’s Caribbean coast.

After waking with excruciating neck pain, a woman descends into a surreal odyssey of fragmented memories, haunting dreams, and the relentless challenges of simply moving.

In Slet 1988, dancer Sonja Vukićević (74) moves through socialist-modernist spaces; her body is an archive of the last mass performance in Yugoslavia. Her gestures echo past rhythms and present realities, intertwining with a 1988 teenage girl’s diary to reveal the shift from socialist collectivism to rising individualism, while a new national collective body is creeping in and will soon shape the future of the country.

More than one thousand single-frame images of candles, each a photograph excerpted from reference encyclopedias, production manuals, and how-to guides, mark time’s passage in Monument to a Period of Time in Which I Lived. A solemn and hallucinatory memento mori, Mungo Thomson’s meticulous reanimation of ephemeral photographs evokes a unique experience of duration, a tension between the moving and the still.

Images cascade and collide in Acetone Reality, as animation, found images, and the artists’ own video recordings crash against a dialogue between computer-generated voices exploring the wonders of acetone and the nature of meaning. Across Sara Magenheimer and Michael Bell-Smith’s teetering montage, blocky pixels, smeared colors, and cryptic iconography constitute an “insane, yet validated reality."

Dooni is the eulogy, voiced by actor Timothy Johnson, of the American soul singer and disco legend Sylvester (1947-1988) as delivered by the gospel singer and preacher Walter Hawkins.

Please note: seating is limited. Box Office opens thirty minutes prior to the listed showtime.