2025 Keynote | Alex Ross Perry

Filmmaker Alex Ross Perry to Deliver Thursday Keynote 

Alex Ross Perry will deliver the Thursday keynote address on Thursday, December 4th.  Perry’s presentation will center on his film Videoheaven, an innovative feature-length collage film constructed entirely from scenes set in video rental stores across decades of film and television history.

Recognized for his sharply observant and adventurous approach, Perry has emerged as a singular voice in contemporary independent cinema. His previous films—including Listen Up Philip, Queen of Earth, Golden Exits, and Her Smell—demonstrate his long-standing interest in memory, culture, and the lived experience of media. With his 2023 feature Videoheaven, Perry drew on hundreds of sources—films, television, commercials, news reports, and related media—to create a layered and incisive meditation on the video store as a cultural landmark: an essential, now-vanishing site of discovery, community, and cinephile identity. His 2024 feature Pavements, an inventive hybrid blending documentary, performance, and archival materials, further expands this exploration of how cultural memory is assembled, preserved, and reinterpreted, examining the fervor and shared mythologies that surround musical icons, and revealing how artists and audiences together shape what becomes part of our cultural canon.

“Videoheaven is a meditation on why these spaces mattered, not just to movie lovers, but to the broader ecosystem of film culture,” said Mike Mashon, President of AMIA. “Its construction from archival fragments makes it a deeply AMIA-relevant work, and his perspective on how we inherit and reinterpret these materials offers insights that feel especially vital to our community.”

Videoheaven continues Perry’s exploration of media history and cultural memory, using archival fragments to examine how informal infrastructures—rental shops, browsing aisles, and home collections—shaped the practices of film watching for a generation.