Painting Cathedral Rock: 2026 Film Festivals + Award Nominations

Painting Cathedral Rock, Mel Day, Experimental Film Short, 2025 (TRT: 3:16)

Part painting, part performance, part film, Painting Cathedral Rock is a quiet meditation on the unstable edges of vision, cinematic spectacle, and subjectivity. A silhouetted figure washes, cleans, and paints the iconic view of Cathedral Rock in Sedona, Arizona—a sacred Indigenous site and popular tourist destination. Ambiguous, shifting references emerge from the cinematic and spiritual to climate change and landscape painting—inviting a ritualistic, open-ended encounter and heightened looking beyond the squares of our current screens.

Directed, edited, and performed by Mel Day
Produced with the support of the Sedona Artist Residency, Sedona Arts Center/Sedona AIR Bay Area Group organized by Melissa Wyman.
Filmed at the Gretchen Warren Interfaith Chapel, Verde Valley School, Arizona. 
Video editing assistance: Justin Edwards; Cinematography and Sound: James Kelley for Shot by Ryan

2026

SUNDIAL FILM FESTIVAL, BEST EXPERIMENTAL SHORT AWARD
March 21 at 7pm, 2026, Cascade Theatre, Redding, California
NEW YORK SHORTS AWARDS, Nominee
TORONTO ART FILM SPIRIT AWARDS, Nominee
CAULDRON INTERNATIONAL FILM AND VIDEO FESTIVAL
Salt Lake City, Utah

DUMBO FILM FESTIVAL, Semi-finalist for Official Selection

2025

SAN JOSE MUSEUM OF ART
Film Art / Art Film Fest
Nov. 7th, 2025