GRRL HAUS x KINSE

Friday, November 21, 2025 | 7:00 PM
11月21日（金）19:00
CAFE AUSGANG on the Kinse Ryokan 1F
80 Nishishinyashiki Tayucho, Shimogyo Ward, Kyoto, 600-8827, Japan
600-8827 京都市下京区西新屋敷太夫町80
Kinse Ryokan

​About Kinse
The Kinse building has had several lifetimes: first as an ageya, where geisha entertained at dinner parties and banquets, then as a ryokan providing guests with traditional food and lodging until the early 1990s

Short films by women, trans, non-binary, and genderqueer artists in experimental, DIY, and underground cinema.

Timetable
19:00 – Doors open (1st DJ Set)
20:00 – First Showing (approx. 40 min)
20:40 – Q&A
21:00 – Second DJ Set
21:40 – Second Showing (approx. 40 min)
22:20 – Last DJ Set
23:00 – Finish

NOT ALONE
Momo Cao
3:27

"Not Alone” is an experimental 2D animated film about a cat that absorbs their twin sister during fetal development, a medical phenomenon known as chimerism. The story follows the cat’s battle with mental health and processing a vivid fantasy world. Through the waves of pain, the sisters reunited. In the end, they both turned into stars.
“Not Alone” is based on Momo’s personal experience and aims to remind viewers that they are not the only ones who bear the emotional pain.

Momo Cao is a visual and story artist whose animations blend cinematic expressions of sound and color. Her drawing style can be warm and cute, or it’s unsettling and dark, depending on the story she wants to tell.

Saturn Risin9
Tiare Ribeaux, Jody Stillwater
10:16
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Queer performance artist and musician Saturn Risin9 returns home to the Bay Area to share their journey of perseverance centering self discovery, healing and creative expansion poetically told through dance, visual narrative, performance, and documentary.

Tiare Ribeaux is a Kānaka ‘Ōiwi filmmaker based in Honolulu, Hawai‘i. Her films disrupt conventional storytelling methods by employing magical realist explorations of spirituality, labor, and the environment to critique both social and ecological imbalances. Her films use components of speculative fiction and fantasy to reimagine both our present realities and future trajectories of healing, queerness, lineage, and belonging. Ribeaux’s work traverses between the mundane and dreamworlds - creating stories around transformation and how our bodies are inextricably linked to land and water systems. She integrates immersion within community, personal/ancestral narratives, and Hawaiian cosmology into her films.

Jody Stillwater 周青海 is a writer, director and creative technologist from the San Francisco Bay Area. His film and interdisciplinary project themes are based in dream logic and tactile reality, with a modern/transforming approach to visual semiotics & archetype, grounded in Eastern rhizomatic systems and Western classical narrative. His cultural background as a Chinese/Norwegian/Cherokee-American amidst colliding waves of post-temporal diaspora and arhythmic, intertidal class structures has influenced a value of justice, representation and the ethereal, and allowed him to express these values in experimental film, immersive installation and narrative cinema.

ATTACK OF THE COAT
Lola-Rose Maxwell
14:06
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A woman gets possessed by a coat.

Lola-Rose Maxwell is an actor, writer and director from Croydon. Unconventionally for a Brit, she started her career doing long-form improv and has grown to be one of the most sought-after improvisers in the UK. Lola-Rose is probably most well known for her viral sketches with Stevie Martin, which have amassed over 45 million views across social media. The duo now direct commercials under the guise NOT A ROBOT and continue to create original comedy content. In 2025, Lola-Rose directed her own short film Attack of the Coat and a zero budget micro short 'Ident'.
Acting wise she is probably best recognised for her role as Sarah in all three seasons of the critically acclaimed BBC/HBO comedy Starstruck but has also appeared on The Now Show, Doctors and upcoming feature film Mother's Pride. Writing wise Lola-Rose has contributed sketches to BBC Radio 4, two episodes of Channel 4’s Rude Tube, and multiple short films including Office Manager. She has also written a horror feature called SALT PIG about a lonely cannibal chef with daddy issues.

INTO THE EMERALD SEA
Asuka Lin
20:14
From the ocean, Suzu returns to their quiet seaside town in Japan, where their grandmother has reincarnated into a sea turtle. Both must undergo their own process of reconnection to each other and with themselves. A loose retelling of the Japanese fisherman folktale Urashima Taro -- but really, it's about missing your grandma after you left for America.
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Asuka Lin is a Japanese-Taiwanese director and DP, born in Nishinomiya, Japan. Their directorial work spans across various genres, but mainly focused within magical realism, encircling stories of diaspora, yearning, and the construct of memory. Their directed films have screened in a number of film festivals, such as London Short Film Festival, Edinburgh International Film Festival, Queer East Film Festival, Chicago Underground Film Festival, and Thomas Edison Film Festival.
They have DP'd various documentary shorts, narrative shorts, and music videos; including the Netflix backed doc Injustice System (2021), directed by Frederick Thornton. This fall, they are slated to DP Charlotte Hong Bee Her's debut feature, Tropical Rain, Death Scented Kiss - a Singaporean gay love story, at the time of the rapture.
Asuka currently resides in Los Angeles, where they wander around, pet stray cats, and dream.

CHORA
Ao Wei 
8:05
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Chora is a life form that I created based on the energetic changes and cycles of the female reproductive system. As women, we experience changes in our bodies throughout our lives, in each 28-day cycle we feel strength and vulnerability, desire and fatigue, pleasure and pain, and one can only see that from our lower body blood flows and life is born, but one cannot realise what endless mysterious changes and powerful regenerative forces lie within our bodies. I try to show them through Chora - Chora, the space before space, the mother, the basis of all languages and civilisations.

Ao Wei (China,1999) ,Space designer, Animation director and Visual artist. Bachelor's Degree from China Academy of Art in 2020 and Distinction Master's Degree from London College of Art in 2023.

Tan/Vatan
Homa Sarabi, Meenakshi Garodia7:34
16 mm Film, Handmade Film, Tan/Vatan -Body/Homeland- is a collaborative experimental film. It is a conversation between two women and their intimate experiences of love and life.
The film embodies a symbolic form borrowed from the origin cultures of the artists, in India and Iran. Tan and Vatan are mutual words in Hindi and Persian language, sharing the same meaning and pronunciation. Artists utilize the language, the medium, and their bodies to connect and visualize their experiences while engaging with the mechanical and physical experience of 16mm and handmade film.

Homa Sarabi is a filmmaker, educator, and programmer from Iran. She is a member of the Feminist Futurist collective, a LEF Flaherty Fellow, and a Mass Cultural Council grantee. Through moving image installations, non-fiction storytelling, and media arts Homa explores the spaces of physical and emotional distance and connection, history, and personal and collective memory. In addition to her independent curatorial practice, she collaborates with the RPM Film Festival as a programmer and serves as the shorts program director for Salem Film Fest. She teaches 16mm filmmaking and collaborative design studios at Emerson College, where she is a faculty fellow with the Engagement Lab.

CUT ME SUMMA DAT NOISE
Cara Hagan
6:11
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Cut Me Summa Dat Noise is a film that celebrates the rhythms of everyday life through the eyes of a neighborhood matriarch who sets the tone for a new day with the beat of her own heart. As the neighborhood comes to life, people of all ages unite in a joyous cacophony of sound that illuminates the connections between them as members of a vibrant and diverse community in rhythm.

Cara Hagan (She/They) is a mover, maker, writer, curator, champion of just communities, and a dreamer. She believes in the power of art to upend the laws of time and physics, a necessary occurrence in pursuit of liberation. In their work, no object or outcome is sacred; but the ritual to get there is. Hagan’s adventures take place as live performance, on screen, as installation, on the page, and in collaboration with others in a multitude of contexts.

DEAD NAME
Gina Kamentsky
4:40

My dead name is trying to kill me.

Gina Kamentsky is an experimental animator and sound artist based in Providence Rhode Island. Her anxious and joyful short films blast out at twenty-four frames per second searing eyeballs and sending waves of buzz and crackle into the ether.
Over her three decade career she’s progressed through numerous forms including painting, drawing and collaging on film, Rotoscope, Musique concrète, sound collage, stop motion and Pixilation.
Kamentsky’s films have screened at festivals nationally and worldwide including Ottawa International Animation Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Annecy International Animated Film Festival and Animator Festival in Poznań Poland.

THE STREETLIGHT
Sophia Parella
6:48
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A man gains a deeper understanding of purpose after helping a talking streetlight through its existential crisis.

Sophia Parella is a writer/director inspired by quiet, dark spaces, where the eyes strain to see. Where an intent stare in the dark finds indistinct outlines grow fuzzy and begin to shift. Her stories focus on inanimate objects, houses, and places alive with emotional energy from the past.