Watch Online Free: Saturday, Oct 18 (24hrs)

Handsome Devil

Daniel Barrow | 2024 | Canada | 5 min | Vic Premiere

Barrow used Amiga software from the late 1980s (DeluxePaint 4) to create this romantic pink and green story of a “sissy devil” who probes the depths of internet intelligence, composing an “advanced search” on an antiquated search engine. Simultaneously, a naked, green, feminine artist traces the contours of her devilish destiny on her sketch pad and within an imaginary dating app. The “advanced search” becomes a kind of contemporary, queer, love poem.

Over the last 20 years, Daniel Barrow has used obsolete technologies to present pictorial narratives by merging the methods and cultural histories of cinema, comic books, animation, shadow puppetry and magic lantern shows. Barrow is best known for creating and adapting comic book narratives to “manual” forms of animation by projecting, layering and manipulating drawings on an overhead projector in live performance contexts.

Unaesthetic Tableau

Sasha Opeiko | 2025 | Canada | 3 min | W Cdn Premiere

Unaesthetic Tableau traces a haunted, blundering passage through a digitally constructed scene built from photos and found images of remnants and dissolution—trash, stains, peeling paint, broken TVs. These fragments were translated into 3D models using AI software that imperfectly and erroneously remediates visual information. Misrecognition becomes a generative force: textures are warped, objects are distorted and the debris of the physical world is reconstituted as digital ruins.

The video’s scene is a virtual tableau that was first screen-recorded and then used as a base or platform for a second version rebuilt in Blender. In this iteration, the models are rendered white and textureless, appearing sculptural, bone-like and spectral. A navigation through this space is animated and layered over the initial footage. The resulting composition resists resolution: frames are dropped, then roughly interpolated, producing low-res motion that echoes the incompleteness and distortion of the models. Sound, too, is abrasive, like a dragging, scraping camera hauling itself through artificial, unfinished terrain.

This work continues my engagement with melancholy, the obscurity of cultural memory and the aesthetic ambiguity of found objects. Here, decay is mediated through digital mistranslation, where loss surfaces in spectral misreadings and partially incoherent reconstructions.

Sasha Opeiko’s artistic research explores redefinitions of melancholy in relation to the nonhuman to investigate decay and the dark reality of objects in the context of late capitalism. Working in a variety of media, including video, installation, new media and painting, she uses remediation of found objects and fragments of visual culture. She has exhibited widely at galleries such as Art Windsor-Essex, Thames Art Gallery and Art Gallery of Peterborough. 

Four Chambers to the Heart

Kostas Ioannidis, Johan Grimonprez | 2023 | Belgium/Netherlands | 9 min | W Cdn Premiere

Palermo 1624. While in quarantine due to the plague, 94-year-old master painter Sofonisba Anguissola, a world renowned artist at the time but later consigned to obscurity, writes her final letters to her pupil and Flemish master-in-the-making Anton Van Dyck.

Kostas Ioannidis lives and works on Andros island and in Brussels. He studied painting and printmaking at Final Art School of Athens and Royal College of Arts, London. He received an MFA in Fine Art from the School of Visual Arts (SVA), New York. Through sound installations, films, sculptures and drawings Ioannidis explores the process of storytelling by questioning the way we perceive time and space. Through displacement of sound, he seeks to create unanticipated situations in unexpected places, triggering questions regarding objective and subjective perceptions, reality and illusion.

Johan Grimonprez’s critically-acclaimed work dances on the borders of practice and theory, art and cinema, documentary and fiction, demanding a double take on the part of the viewer. Informed by an archeology of present-day media, his work seeks out the tension between the intimate and the bigger picture of globalization. It questions our contemporary sublime, one framed by a fear industry that has infected political and social dialogue. By suggesting new narratives through which to tell a story, his work emphasizes a multiplicity of realities.

artist

Lydia Nsiah | 2025 | Austria | 3 min | Cdn Premiere

artist highlights self-care and masculinity from an artistic and documentary perspective. The film celebrates images of togetherness, care and sensitivity at the Mr. Artist Barbershop in Vienna. Filmed by hand, the camera stays close to the protagonists. The body rhythm of the filmmaker is written into and onto the film exposures and converses with the experienced hand gestures of the barbers. Through craft and artistic expression, two forms of work enter into a sensual and transformative dialogue with each other. The analogue, warmly coloured and abstracted 16mm exposures are interwoven with an immersive and nuanced sound space composed by musician Rojin Sharafi. 

Lydia Nsiah is an artist, filmmaker and writer, based in Vienna and abroad. She works with the in-betweens, abysses and gaps in audiovisual knowledge production by means of film, photography, text and installation. Her films transform and incorporate found and recorded analogue and digital memory images, often in collaboration with sound artists. She publishes and exhibits internationally on speculative fiction and decolonial practice, body and virtuality, forgetting and remembering, failure and error, film art and use.

Don’t You Like the Green of A?

Nelson Henricks | 2025 | Canada | 11 min | W Cdn Premiere

Don’t You Like the Green of A? is based on the correspondences between letters and colours specific to the American abstract painter Joan Mitchell’s synaesthesia—a condition that Henricks happens to share with her. Synaesthesia is a neurological syndrome in which perception by one sense automatically triggers a perception in one of the other senses. This connectivity between senses may be manifested in different ways. For example, in grapheme-colour synaesthesia, numbers or letters are associated with colours; in music-colour synaesthesia, people perceive colour by hearing a sound or music. Don’t You Like the Green of A? is made from Joan Mitchell’s associations between letters of the alphabet and certain colours and is presented as a more exaggerated combination of these associations.

Nelson Henricks was born in Bow Island, Alberta and graduated from the Alberta College of Art. He moved to Montréal in 1991 and received a BFA from Concordia University. He recently completed a PhD at Université du Québec à Montréal. Henricks has taught art history and studio art at Concordia University, McGill University, UQAM and Université de Montréal. His writings have been published in exhibition catalogues, magazines and several anthologies. A curator and artist, Henricks is best known for his videotapes and video installations, which have been exhibited worldwide. A focus on his video work was presented at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, as part of the Video Viewpoints series in 2000. Henricks was the recipient of the Bell Canada Award in Video Art in 2002, the Prix Giverny Capital in 2015 and the Prix Louis-Comtois in 2023. An exhibition of his work was presented at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal in 2023. His work is in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada, the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Montréal Museum of Fine Arts, the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, the Musée d’art contemporain de Montreal and others. He is represented by Paul Petro Contemporary Art in Toronto.

Discrete Kinesis No. 2

Eislow Johnson, Kate In | 2025 | USA | 2 min | World Premiere

The second entry in an interlude series within the multiple potential interstitial states of string harmonics. Hand processing and 16mm-to-digital scanning are treated as points of intervention and compositional instruments.

Eislow Johnson is a filmmaker, sound designer/mixer and educator based in Chicago. His practice engages with cinema as a sound art and as a way of navigating and responding to the world’s vibration and instability. His films have screened at Prismatic Ground, L’Alternativa, Cinemateca Nacional del Ecuador, Onion City, Light Matter, Engauge Experimental, Milwaukee Underground, and Cosmic Rays, among others. He is currently an Arts Fellow in the Department of Film and Media at Emory University.

Kate In is an artist, sound engineer, and educator based in Chicago. Her work involves research and experimentation with sound technologies, sound design for documentary media, electroacoustic music composition and participatory, non-hierarchical collaboration. She holds an MA in Sound Arts and Industries from Northwestern University and is an engineer and studio manager at Experimental Sound Studio, a non-profit dedicated to the creative exploration of sound.

The Individual

Sara Sowell | 2024 | USA | 28 min | Cdn Premiere

A speculative reimagining of artworks, events and artists of Dada between 1912–1923, 100 years later. Paradoxes between image-making, representation, photography, capital and language are examined and embodied. Appropriating Man Ray’s autobiography as a point of departure, other sources include writings from Rosalind Krauss, Claude Cahun and Kathy Acker.

Sara Sowell is an artist and experimental filmmaker. Her films, installations and performances reanimate legacies of art and media production through haptic aesthetic interventions. Her work has been exhibited in artist-run spaces, galleries and international film festivals including Microscope Gallery, CROSSROADS, The Wexner Center for the Arts, Baltic Analog Lab and IFFR.