Catalogue > At random

A mom cries, photos fly, cats spy, and bodies collide in this sci-fi soap opera about people who are desperately searching for ways to cure their fears of loneliness. Dad is dying, mom can’t sleep, and Nancy is determined to find a photograph so she can forget something that she saw. Linda relives a past trauma and fears what might happen while she is away from home. Meanwhile, her boyfriend Mark entertains a mysterious stranger, who is secretly conducting a deadly experiment.

Mike Olenick’s perverse films focus on memories, reproduction, appropriation, transformation, and forbidden desire. His films have screened at Slamdance, Fantasia International Film Festival, Fantastic Fest, Palm Springs ShortFest, Hamburg International Short Film Festival, and the World Wide Video Festival; streamed on MUBI; and won awards at the Slamdance, Ann Arbor, Big Muddy, and Chicago Underground film festivals. For nearly fifteen years Mike was a video editor in the Film/Video Studio residency program at the Wexner Center for the Arts. He’s worked as an editor on projects for Guy Maddin (including “Keyhole” and “The Forbidden Room”), the Quay Brothers, Sadie Benning, and Lucy Raven, among others. Since 2003 he has edited numerous films for Jennifer Reeder including “A Million Miles Away,” which screened at Sundance. He also edited her feature “Knives and Skin,” which premiered at the Berlin Film Festival and is distributed by IFC Midnight. Projects he has worked on as an editor are in the collections of MoMA, the Guggenheim, the Whitney, and the Tate. Mike has an MFA in Photography from the Cranbrook Academy of Art. In 2016 he was awarded a fellowship at the inaugural Shudder Labs.