Ryoto Akaike’s Yellow Margarine Awarded Best Psychedelic/Magical Realism Feature
Mustapha Khan’s Life and Breath Named Best Feature Documentary
The Psychedelic Film and Music Festival has announced the award winners for its seventh annual event, which featured a lineup of films, music videos, and panels with filmmakers. Screenings were held on December 14th at the Producers Club Theaters in Midtown Manhattan. Exploring the influence and breakthroughs of the psychedelic community, the event recognized nine official selections for outstanding filmmaking, storytelling, and music. For more information on this year’s lineup, visit https://www.psychedelicfilmandmusicfestival.com.
Congratulations to the winners of The Psychedelic Film and Music Festival:
Best Psychedelic/Magical Realism Feature
Yellow Margarine
Director Ryoto Akaike
Japan, 100 min
The film is about 10 characters who are “someone/something like” (who are something like a nerd, something like a girlfriend, something like an action hero, something like a yakuza and so on), exploring themselves in the interaction with each others in the imaginary small town.It describes their uniqueness, loneliness, struggles, affection.
Best Feature Documentary
Life and Breath
Director Mustapha Khan
United States, 75 min
A new documentary exploring Holotropic Breathwork, LIFE AND BREATH takes us into an extraordinary group Breathwork session in Vermont, where an eclectic collection of scholars, artists and dreamers are instructed to simply: “Breathe until you are surprised.
Best Psychedelic Horror Short
The Aesthete
Directors Kaylan Jordan-Sen, Ian Sen
United Kingdom, 20 min
The Aesthete is a psychedelic horror film with a sting in its tail. Horror elements aside, it deals with themes of dangerous art, drug use, manipulation, the nature of loneliness and alienation as experienced by the outsider, the things we will believe when truly desperate…and the possibility, perhaps, of transcendence.
Best Psychedelic Short
Circology
Director Tero Peltoniemi
Finland, 10 min
Set in a universe of magical realism, a boastful father prattles on superficially about his daughter to another parent in the school pick up line, but is unable to perceive her when it matters most.
Best Animation
Demi-Demons
Director Martin Gerigk
Germany, 18 min
Demi-Demons is an essay film about the contradictions of contemporary existence, which separate us from our natural instincts, opening abysses within us. The glorification of the hermaphrodite, the hedonism of virtual realities, the search for new levels of physical attraction and forms of higher consciousness, ambivalence towards sexual reproduction, these abysses embody the existential struggles inherent in navigating the terrain between instinct and enlightenment in a rapidly evolving world.
Best Psychedelic Music Video
Leaf Man
Director Kevin Ackley
United States, 20 min
Leaf Man is a metaphysical monster movie following a man’s odyssey through a world of organic existential transformations. With momentum from a powerful shoegaze score, this wordless short film uses surreal and strange dual-roled characters to dance through the boundary between ourselves, our surroundings, and each other, in the search for a meaningful life.
Best Short Documentary
Liminal Space: Diving Within
Director Anahita Safarnejad Choobary
Germany, 20 min
A poetic exploration of a father-daughter relationship. Anahita grows up in front of her father’s camera. A dreamy life fulfilled with love and poetry evolves into a nightmare in which she witnesses her identity get lost as her father dies of cancer. In her quest to understand death, she dives into a rollercoaster ride of unknown emotions and embarks on a voyage of acceptance. From death into an immortal world.
Best Psychedelic Song
Clyde Meets the Aliens
Released by Bohacz & Frenz
Best Screenplay
Delirium – Have You Heard The New Drug In Town?
About The Psychedelic Film and Music Festival:
The Psychedelic Film and Music Festival explores the altered states of consciousness and psychedelia created by film, music, art and other forms of media. Founded in 2018, the event has showcased independent feature films, shorts, music videos and documentaries, and panels with distinguished guests, and pushes the boundaries of psychedelic and noetic realities to give audiences a unique and visceral experience.
Connect with Us:
Website: https://www.psychedelicfilmandmusicfestival.com
