Friday | Oct 16 | 6pm
Screening @ Deluge
Medium Close
In-Person Screening: Medium Close
Student/Older Adult $6 (use code 25OFF at checkout)
Watch Online Free: Saturday, Oct 17 (24hrs)
novem
BIG TOP Collective | 2026 | Canada | 3 min | World Premiere
novem is the ninth in a series of abstract poetic films made by the BIG TOP collective of Trace Nelson and Peter Sandmark. The film uses archival and found 16mm and 8mm footage along with original footage shot by the duo then hand painted and collaged in editing. The film has an original soundscape, using voices and various noise instruments, to add to the film’s sense of anxiety and disembodiment, as figures cartwheel through rock formations and cloud landscapes.
BIG TOP collective is Trace Nelson and Peter Sandmark. Nelson has worked as an art educator over the past 28 years, teaching at Concordia University, Vancouver Island School of Art and University of Victoria. While living in Montreal, she also worked at the Canadian Centre for Architecture. Since 1985, Sandmark has taught filmmaking and film studies courses at Concordia University and University of Victoria. He also worked for media art centres such as Main Film. IMAA in Montreal and FLUX media gallery in Victoria.
Medium Close
Richard Martin | 2026 | Canada | 11 min | Cdn Premiere
Found footage from 1980s TV movies, camera tests and commercials is aligned with an invented narrative exploring conventions of cinema, love, relationships and their sometimes painful consequences. Cynicism and cliches along with love and regrets frame a narrative that is at once personal and every person.
Richard Martin is an award-winning filmmaker from Vancouver. He holds an MFA in Film Production from the University of British Columbia. His work encompasses experimental film and video as well as mainstream feature film and television. His experimental work has screened at Berlin International Film Festival, Oberhausen, Ann Arbor, Toronto International, Rencontres Paris/Berlin and many more.
Haavens
Shanna Maurizi | 2026 | Netherlands/USA | 6 min | World Premiere
A relationship fractures due to distance as shipments move in and out of the port of Rotterdam. On the days the port is closed, the vast area becomes a landscape used by other inhabitants. The film was hand processed and painted in Rotterdam, along with the process-related optical sound.
Shanna Maurizi (USA) studied Photography, Film and Painting at San Francisco State University and UC Santa Cruz and received an MFA in Film from California College of the Arts. Her works in experimental photography, sculpture, film and expanded cinema have been exhibited at festivals, museums, galleries and cinematheques in North America and Europe including Ann Arbor, MediaCity, Anthology Film Archives, Famous Accountants and many others. Her film Sunken Treasure won the Art and Science Award at the 56th Ann Arbor Film Festival, her short film Late Night with Carl Sagan premiered at NewFilmmakers NYC and she was nominated for Best Emerging Director for her first feature at Visionfest in 2011. Currently she leads 16mm workshops in Detroit as co-founder of Mothlight Workshops.
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Jesse McLean | 2026 | USA | 12 min | Cdn Premiere
Amid a pandemic and a failing marriage, a woman retreats into obsessive fantasy. A film star becomes her companion as boundaries between reality and reverie blur. Lost in a frozen Antarctic landscape inspired by Frank Hurley’s 1914 Endurance expedition photographs, escapism becomes a mirror revealing how far she’s drifted from herself.
Jesse McLean is a filmmaker exploring hybrid forms that blur documentary, narrative and experimental modes. Her work expands everyday gestures into reflections on memory, desire and the human relationship to the nonhuman. Her films have screened internationally, and she is Professor and Chair of Film, Video, Animation and New Genres at UW–Milwaukee. McLean has presented her work at museums, galleries and film festivals worldwide, including CPH: DOX in Copenhagen; New York Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Venice Film Festival, Kassel Dokfest, Impakt Festival, First Look Festival, Imagine Science Film Festival, Internationale Kurzfilmtage Winterthur in Switzerland, Yebizo Festival of Art + Alternative Visions, EXiS, Mumok in Vienna and Green Gallery in Milwaukee. She was the recipient of an International Critics Prize (FIPRESCI Prize) at Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen and a Jury Prize in International Competition at the 2013 Videoex Festival in Switzerland. She was a featured artist at the 2014 Flaherty Seminar and a MacDowell Fellow in 2016. In 2016, she was selected for a Mary L. Nohl Individual Artist Fellowship and was a fellow at the Center for 21st Century Studies. She is currently Professor and Chair of the Department of Film, Video, Animation and New Genres, within the Peck School of the Arts and University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
Hurricane Season
Michelle Trujillo | 2026 | USA/Canada | 6 min | Vic Premiere
Hurricane anxiety takes a visceral form as the image searches for an escape route. Inspired by true events. Created on 16mm film and developed with comfrey, mint, yerba mate and willow leaves.
Michelle Trujillo was born in Miami to Colombian and Costa Rican parents and grew up in South Florida. The focus of her practice is to question and explore representations of Latine culture, gender and identity. Her films have been exhibited in festivals, galleries and conferences nationally and internationally such as Alchemy Film Festival, RPM, Mimesis Documentary Festival and have won awards such as the Lightpress Grant and the LEF Moving Image Grant.
Palimpsest 3: Bell Riots
Michael Alexander Morris | 2025 | USA | 4 min | Cdn Premiere
A series of one-reel diary films made up of improvised superimpositions. The mundane and the absurd aspects of contemporary life that overwrite one another: the moon over Seattle, the trees turning red along with Michigan, the Cardassian occupation of Bajor, children burning in their tents, revolt in the Sanctuary Districts. Captured in camera without editing on 8mm and blown up to 16mm.
Michael A. Morris is an artist and educator based in Granville, Ohio. His work responds to rapid changes in how moving images are created and experienced in the 21st century, affirming the traditional space of experiencing cinema while exploring implications of new media. Morris has performed and screened his films and videos at museums, galleries, microcinemas and film festivals internationally, including Crossroads at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, MediaLive at Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, International Symposium of Electronic Art in Vancouver, Microscope Gallery, Istanbul International Experimental Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival and Artist's Television Access.
He received a Kodak award from Florida Experimental Film and Video Festival and awards from Southern Colorado Film Festival, Haverhill Film Festival and Athens International Film and Video Festival and was included as part of Ann Arbor Film Festival's touring program in 2018.
Ottu
Sandra Ignagni | 2024 | Canada/France | 20 min | Cdn Premiere
A filmmaker searches for the eight winds of the Mediterranean on the island of Corsica. Using found footage and employing 16mm hand-processing experiments that attempt to expose its ethereal subject, the film brings audiences to abandoned churches, cemeteries and ravaged beaches in its quest to find meaning in that which is invisible and has neither source nor end.
Sandra Ignagni is an award-winning nonfiction filmmaker, a recent graduate of the MFA program in Film Production at York University and an alumna of the summer fellowship program at UnionDocs Center for Documentary Art in Brooklyn NY. She holds a PhD in Political Science and a Master of Arts in Indigenous and Canadian Studies. Her short films have screened at festivals around the world and are currently streaming on CBC Canadian Reflections, Knowledge, En Route/Air Canada and on the National Film Board of Canada website (NFB.ca). She is an occasional contributor to Documentary Magazine.
Friday | Oct 16 | 8pm
Screening @ Deluge
Every Epoch Dreams the Next
In-Person Screening: Every Epoch Dreams the Next
Student/Older Adult $6 (use code 25OFF at checkout)
Watch Online Free: Saturday, Oct 17 (24hrs)
With You
Samantha Chater | 2026 | Canada/Estonia/Finland/France/Iceland/Switzerland/UK | 4 min | Vic Premiere
Composed of images of European streets, buildings and passing strangers. Between correspondence, distance and urban drift, With You is a study of intimacy, absence and the unstable space between seeing and hearing.
Samantha Chater is a Toronto-based filmmaker and writer. With You is her first film as director, shot on 16mm and structured around archival correspondence. She was co-writer and associate producer on the Canadian feature Matt and Mara (2024), which premiered at Berlin International Film Festival and screened at Toronto International Film Festival. She has also worked in publicity for independent films in Canada for over a decade.
XYZ
Alexandre Alagôa | 2026 | Luxembourg/Portugal | 12 min | Cdn Premiere
An obsessive exploration of the three geometric dimensions in hopes of reaching a fourth.
Alexandre Alagôa is a Portuguese experimental filmmaker and electronic music producer. His short films have been screened at more than 100 festivals all around the world including Annecy, Vienna Shorts, Go Short, Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, IndieLisboa, Festival Tous Courts, Short Waves, Bogotá Experimental Film Fest, Videoformes.
Drawing on conceptual art, the Fluxus movement, Op Art and the Structural Film tradition, his practice intertwines scientific studies of physiology and psychology with the raw plasticity of moving images, often shattering the senses of vision and hearing into new sensible, obscure realms. By emphasizing the formal elements of film (grain, flicker effects, the plain surface of celluloid and the canvas, use of rhythm and repetition, manipulation of the still frame and camera movement) in a constant dialogue with optical phenomena (after-images, phosphenes, purkinje trees), Alagôa’s films destabilize and reorganize the core mechanics of perception.
En La Paz
Jeremy Moss | 2026 | Bolivia/USA | 3 min | World Premiere
Created in-camera on a rooftop in La Paz, Bolivia in July on B&W reversal film with my Bolex as dusk was approaching. The city’s sea of antennas and surrounding mountains pointing to the sky inform the film’s sound.
Jeremy Moss is an independent film programmer and experimental filmmaker. He has organized and curated programs for Moviate Underground Film Festival, Gleaners Film Festival and Gleaners Film Club weekly cinema series. In his creative practice, he uses both film and video, often blending and overlapping a number of genres and modes—surrealist nonfiction, experimental fiction, personal film, dance and emulsion-based abstraction. His work has been presented at Artist Television Access, Anthology Film Archives, TIFF Lightbox, UnionDocs, Microscope Gallery, Northwest Film Forum, Chicago Underground, CROSSROADS, Antimatter, Jihlava International Documentary Film Festival, Edinburgh International Film Festival and Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival.
Branches issues du béton [Branches from Concrete]
Zhenyu Zhou | 2026 | China | 14 min | Cdn Premiere
In my hometown, Hengshui, in northern China, a shopping centre that was never completed has been left abandoned. Wild plants grow in the building’s interstices. Local residents have taken over certain spaces, transforming them into leisure areas for ping-pong, dance, boxing, etc. One day, from my window I noticed that a once-upright wild tree had leaned over, as if dying on the concrete roof.
Zhou Zhenyu is an artist working in film and video installation. His autobiographical films depict landscapes and people that have been overlooked in the modernization process of contemporary Chinese society. Both actor and observer of his own work, he explores the relationships between his subjects and himself.
Fluss
Penny McCann | 2025 | Canada | 4 min | Cdn Premiere
A journey down the Danube River is transformed into a dream space of half-seen images and flickering shorelines. Though at times abstract, the river remains certain, always moving towards the sea. Filmed in black and white 16mm and hand-processed, Fluss is a companion to River (2023), a study of the Ottawa River in winter. Commissioned by Ottawa’s Lightproof Film Collective.
Penny McCann's body of media artwork spans thirty years and encompasses both narrative and experimental films and video. Her work has been widely exhibited nationally and internationally, including Ann Arbor Film Festival, Hamburg International Short Film Festival, Ottawa Art Gallery and Cinémathèque Québécoise.
Big Time
Jackie Dives, Matt Meuse | 2026 | Canada | 1 min | World Premiere
My partner kissed me on the lips and then got into a taxi headed towards the airport where he would get on a plane to Japan for a job that would keep him there for a minimum of two years. Before the taxi was out of sight I texted him, “We can do this, right?” to which he replied, “Big time.” Two days later I started punching holes into found 16mm film as a way to stay grounded. The resulting footage is a symbolic representation of the way I experience anxiety, which is primarily through repetitive, racing thoughts. The audio is a field recording from Shibuya Station, that my partner sent me on his way to work one morning, which felt like a love letter from him. This film is about long distance, communication, affection and also about working through being an anxiously attached adult as a result of living through an unstable childhood.
Jackie Dives is a multi-disciplinary artist working within photography, video, performance and installation. She uses auto-ethnography and collaborative storytelling to address themes of social justice, trauma, grief, identity and community. Her work has been recognized by Canada Council for the Arts, BC Arts Council, Pollock-Krasner Foundation and Digital Publishing Awards. She has exhibited and screened internationally including Galerie Sans Nom (Moncton), Burrard Arts Foundation (Vancouver), Gallery Gachet (Vancouver) and Maysles Documentary Center (New York).
Every Epoch Dreams the Next
Johannes Gierlinger | 2025 | Austria/Albania | 19 min | Cdn Premiere
A dream, a city, a boy. The starting point for the film Every Epoch Dreams the Next is an excerpt from the film Qyteti me i ri ne bote (Xhanfise Keko 1974, The Youngest City in the World) from communist-era Albania. In a dream-like scene in this feature, a boy dreams of a modern city in which progress and change are represented by buildings and constructions. Every Epoch Dreams the Next revolves around the historical and current transformation processes of the urban space of the Albanian city of Tirana and reflects on the power of images, historical and contemporary utopias and the interplay with architecture. The film examines the dream as a space of action in which historical and social inscriptions, transformations and connections between different eras and systems merge with one another. Every Epoch Dreams the Next explores how a cityscape changes as power structures shift and how these power structures can override the common good and the general public. A reflection on democratic developments, new and old regimes, money laundering, propaganda and the accessibility of public space.
In his work, Austrian filmmaker Johannes Gierlinger deals with forms of memory, remembrance and perspectives of resistance. Through it he explores traces, constellations, transformations and connections between different epochs and political systems. In his inimitable poetic-essayistic style, Gierlinger examines historical and contemporary forms of representation, layers and patterns and asks to what extent their structures and effects are interwoven, visible and perceptible in today's societies.
His work has screened at national as well as international film festivals and institution, among others Visions Du Réel Nyon (CH), Belvedere21 (AT), IMPAKT Festival (NL), Werkleitz Centre for Media Art (DE), CPH: DOX (DK), Museum der Moderne Salzburg (AT), EMAF Osnabrück (DE), Bienal de Artes Mediales de Santiago (CL), Dokufest (KOS), FIC Valdivia (CL), Edinburgh IFF (GB), Antimatter [Media Art] (CA), rotor Graz (AT), Diagonale Graz (AT). Gierlinger lives and works in Vienna.