Carsey-Wolf Center at UC Santa Barbara 
Connectivity: vulture
- Thursday, October 16, 2025 / 7:00 PM - 9:15 PM (PDT)
- Pollock Theater
- Screening Format: 4K digital projection (Total program runtime: 81 minutes)
Deep 1: 15 minutes; vulture: 57 minutes; endings: 9 minutes - With Philip Hoffman (filmmaker)
Early on in vulture, a child declares: “Vultures live together, and they don’t fight—they help each other.” Like many of Philip Hoffman’s films, vulture is a rumination on alternative ways of thinking, doing, and being together. Since 1994, Hoffman has led the Independent Imaging Retreat (colloquially known as Film Farm) in Ontario, guiding filmmakers to incorporate place-based methods and eco-processing in their work. Hoffman’s own films thematize artistic practice as a conscious engagement with the surrounding environment, carefully surveying the local flora and fauna and subtly breaking down the barriers between human, plant, and animal. By extensively using local plants in the processing of filmic material, the films themselves serve as a poetic expression of an ecosystem at work. In the images and the processes that allow for their emergence, Hoffman meditates on shared experience and how we can collectively care for the environments in which we live.
The Carsey-Wolf Center is proud to have welcomed filmmaker Philip Hoffman to the Pollock Theater for a presentation of three of his films: Deep 1 (2023, 15 minutes), vulture (2019, 57 minutes), and endings (2024, 9 minutes). After the screening, Hoffman joined moderator Alex Lilburn (Film and Media Studies, UCSB) for a discussion of his work.
Biographies
Philip Hoffman (filmmaker)
A film artist of memory and association, Philip Hoffman has long been recognized as Canada’s preeminent diary filmmaker. Throughout this career, Hoffman has been honored with more than twenty-five retrospectives of his work. He is the recipient of the Golden Gate Award at the San Francisco International Film Festival and the Gus Van Sant Award at the Ann Arbor Film Festival for What These Ashes Wanted (2001); the Kodak Cinematic Vision Award at Ann Arbor Film Festival for vulture (2019); and the Best Director at Ribalta Film Festival for endings (2024, co-directed with Isiah Medina). In 2016, Hoffman received the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts. Since 1994, he has been the artistic director of the Independent Imaging Retreat (Film Farm), a one-week workshop in artisanal filmmaking that takes place in Mount Forest, Ontario. Currently, he teaches in the Department of Cinema & Media Arts at York University.
Moderator Alex Lilburn (Film and Media Studies, UCSB)
Alex Lilburn is a PhD candidate in Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He holds a BA in the History and Theory of Contemporary Art from the San Francisco Art Institute. Prior to coming to UCSB, he worked at the Sundance and Telluride Film Festivals and volunteered at Canyon Cinema in San Francisco. His current research explores the ways in which contemporary Indigenous communities utilize an array of media techniques to cultivate cultural practice and redefine their relationship to land and the state.
This event is sponsored by the Carsey-Wolf Center.
CWC Presents: Connectivity
The Carsey-Wolf Center’s 2025-26 feature series Connectivity examines the evolving meaning of connection in our contemporary moment. While the term “connectivity” often invokes our ever-increasing entanglement with digital infrastructure and social media networks, this series reimagines the term not only as a technical feature of media, but as a humanistic value and a condition of social and public life. This series embraces connectivity as a framework for thinking critically about the ways in which people use media to connect with ideas and with one another, from the shared experience of moviegoing to the collective bonds forged through storytelling and public dialogue.