Haxan Film Festival

Haxan Festival is a San Francisco Bay Area film festival focusing on local filmmakers exploring psychic and mystic connections to our surroundings, ancestors, and spirituality. We will show short experimental works which explore magic, gender subversion, mysticism, ritual, and connections to the earth and nature. We are interested in the Bay Area’s rich history of psychics, savants, mysticism, and occult practices dating back to the psychedelic 1960s and beyond. We want to present the kitsch of New Age pop culture alongside the eternally sacred and mythological, as both serve as an interesting avenue into this colorful history and distinct culture. We have invented the term “personal occult” to describe the modern iteration of ancient spirituality which is often filtered through a pop culture lens, resulting in subcultures such as goth and sea punk lifestyles. We are looking for works that take this premise and make it personal and real. Our festival will celebrate witchcraft and this personal occult.

The Haxan Festival seeks to make a more effective context for artist made films in our community by broadening the audience for experimental film, while working within the cultural microcosm of the occult. We are interested in collaborating with multimedia artists to exhibit other formats including short segments of music, performance and three dimensional art. Rather than bringing together an audience of people interested in film specifically, we seek to bring together a community of people interested in metaphysical explorations under the Haxan aesthetic. By being open to interdisciplinary modes of exhibition, Haxan Festival remodels the idea of the traditional Film Festival into a more contemporary, adaptive cinematic experience.

We will screen the films at Lobot Gallery in Oakland, CA. To be as inclusive as possible we will operate under a sliding scale donation based entry fee. For our program we will hold open submissions and specially invite local filmmakers.