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.

A short visceral narrative film unfolds in three parts to describe loss. From our earliest experience of separation to the imperceptible violence associated with integrating to a new country when yours is no longer livable, Morning Circle follows a father and son in their intimate rituals as they prepare to start the day and head to kindergarten.

The Early Sun, Red As A Hunter's Moon follows this temporal tradition in an interpolation of Kiowa lore in excerpts from N. Scott Momaday's The Way to Rainy Mountain, a reunion in Portugal between the filmmaker and their friend after 20 years, and a historical attempt to decode a cryptic letter from 1890 with “hieroglyphic script” that arrived at Pennsylvania’s Carlisle Indian Industrial School sent from a reservation in the Oklahoma Territory to a Kiowa student named Belo Cozad. Shot on expired 8mm film, the film presents a collision of fragments of time and Kiowa memory.

A one-minute entry from the Hauntology Film Archives, a series described as “ghostly and abstracted representations of political and physical landscapes.”

A staccato of images and sounds punctuate a letter, both impossible to compose and deliver. This film culminates over four years of research around the bonds of mutual struggle for freedom that developed between India and Africa against the Portuguese empire, focusing on the life of Sita Valles, an Angolan-born doctor and revolutionary of Goan origin who joined the liberation movement against the Portuguese in Angola and was subsequently disappeared there. Scenes of wandering, words of longing, and animations from the architecture of the historic 1955 Afro-Asian solidarity conference in Bandung weave narratives of failure, possibility, and revolutionary desire. Combining the materialist techniques of burying, scratching, and chemically altering 16mm film, and Sanzgiri’s signature visual language of digital animations, 3D scanning, and archival translations, the film wrestles with its own form to test the efficacy of words and images in times of struggle, mourning, suffering, and action.

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