Friday | Oct 18 | 6pm
Screening @ Deluge
Of Time, and the Town
Watch Online Free: Saturday, Oct 19 (24hrs)
The Instability of Clouds
Zazie Ray-Trapido | 2024 | USA | 15 min | W Cdn Premiere
Two neighbours bond after a shared traumatic event, a continuous home development creeps into nature’s threshold and a community celebrates freedom. The Instability of Clouds navigates an ecosystem in decay and growth while traversing its spaces of comfort, spectacle and disaster. Through observing and constructing facets within a suburban neighbourhood in Southern California, connections between landscape, neighbours and environment ruminate on the American dream and its resonances.
Zazie Ray-Trapido is a filmmaker from Philadelphia. Her films expand on traditional formats of documentary and narrative, engaging with analog film techniques, archives and performance. Her practice investigates relationships between memory, ideology and the environment. Her work has been screened at festivals and venues worldwide, such as New York Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Viennale, Curtas Vila do Conde, Athens International Film and Video, Glasgow Short Film Festival, ICDOCS, Kasseler Dokfest and others. She holds a BFA from Bard College and a MFA in Film/Video from California Institute of the Arts.
Plots
Louis Heilbronn | 2024 | USA | 9 min | Cdn Premiere
As a mysterious developer buys up rural land, a local lawyer hand delivers buyout offers to her clients. Inspired by real-life secretive land acquisitions in Solano County, California, by Flannery Associates, Plots withholds audible dialogue in order to underscore the mystery and confusion that residents faced during a buying spree where they purchased 50,000 acres in order to build a new city.
Louis Heilbronn is a French-American photographer born in New York. He received a BA from Bard College in 2010 and an MFA from the University of California Los Angeles in 2018. His work has been exhibited at Galerie Polaris in Paris and in group exhibitions at the 16th International Architecture Biennale in Venice, Centre d’art contemporain Meymac, Bass Museum of Art in Miami and Alice Austen House in Staten Island. His films have been screened in festivals such as the Palm Springs Shortfest, Wisconsin Film Festival and New Filmmakers New York.
ESP
Laura Kraning | 2024 | USA | 3 min | Cdn Premiere
A brutalist monument to the Empire State as manifested by a malfunctioning inkjet printer. Chroma and luminance are made audible as architectural and printed lines converge and dissolve into pattern and noise. Photographed in the Capitol City of Albany, New York.
Laura Kraning’s moving image work navigates landscape as a repository for memory, cultural mythology and the technological sublime. Exploring absence and the fluidity of time, she evokes liminal spaces of neither past, nor present, but a landscape of the imagination. Laura’s work has screened widely at international film festivals and venues, such as MoMA’s Doc Fortnight, the New York Film Festival, Edinburgh International Film Festival, BFI London Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Visions du Réel, National Gallery of Art, Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center, REDCAT Theater and Los Angeles Filmforum, among others. Laura currently resides in New York, where she teaches in the Department of Media Study at University of Buffalo.
Cancer Alley
Pamela Falkenberg, Jack Cochran | 2023 | USA | 9 min | Cdn Premiere
A collaboration with poet Lucy English combines footage shot on location in Cancer Alley with images of nature, especially cypress groves which are as fragile and threatened as the Cancer Alley communities themselves; small towns near the Mississippi River, between East Baton Rouge and New Orleans, which are now dominated by more than 200 chemical plants and oil refineries, sometimes literally located in residents’ back yards.
For almost nine years, Jack Cochran and Pamela Falkenberg have been making award-winning films together again under the name Outlier Moving Pictures. They hope their work will prove worthy of the name, avoiding the usual patterns and approaching their subject matter from the margins. Their work screens widely and internationally at various film festivals, particularly those with a focus on poetry and ecology.
Of Time, and the Town
David Ellsworth | 2024 | USA | 28 min | Cdn Premiere
Of Time, and the Town poetically depicts 20 years of changes and constants in the built environment of Farmville, Virginia and in the rural areas surrounding it. The film’s Super 8 images bear witness to how everyday locales provide markers of the town’s social evolution. A young couple labours to renovate an abandoned 19th century school and make it their home while the town’s previously shuttered all-Black high school finds new life as a civil rights museum documenting the 1950s student strike that helped integrate the county’s schools. Children grow as one-hundred-year-old oak trees fall. Excerpts from the town’s AM radio station provide a sonic touchstone that complements the film’s sound design.
My work as a filmmaker is an ongoing exploration of the ways people of different cultures and locales navigate their built environments and public spaces. Representations of temporality are central to my work. My images seek to evoke a more acute sense of time and allow viewers to perceive the past in the present. My formal strategies include variable speed imagery, compositional and editorial juxtaposition, and the expressive use of colour saturation and texture inherent in images created with Super 8 reversal film. These formal methods seek to create a visual sense of time-based relativity that enables viewers to see how both people and their “everyday” environments have changed and evolved over time. These images are evocatively impressionistic and real at the same time. In choosing this venerable medium as a primary medium to artistically depict a variety of social and geographical landscapes, I hope that my work will provide viewers with a new awareness of their own personal surroundings and thereby reflect on how perception can transform our ways of seeing the world.
Friday | Oct 18 | 8pm
Screening @ Deluge
When We Encounter the World
In-Person Screening: When We Encounter the World
Student/Older Adult $6 (use code 25OFF at checkout)
Watch Online Free: Saturday, Oct 19 (24hrs)
Looking for Letine
Paul Tarragó | 2024 | UK | 15 min | Cdn Premiere
Unable to locate the grave of Letine—19th century leader of an acrobatic cycling troupe (buried locally)—I went home and wondered. And then I made this film. Equal parts experimental animation, stylised domestic drama, and autobiography accompanied by reflections on mortality, filmmaking and magic.
I’m a filmmaker, using both video and celluloid, living in London. My work? A mix of underground experimentation and metafiction, tugging at the leash of film language but with narrative often held close at hand. My work has shown widely on film festival and gallery circuits (International Film Festival Rotterdam, NYUFF, EMAF, National Review of Live Art, Triangle France, Brooklyn Museum of Art, ICA London), and includes several award winning experimental narratives, video installation, a collaborative feature film, cinematic sketchbooks, moving image and live soundtrack performance work, etc. I currently work as a lecturer at the University of the Arts London.
It Is a Beautiful Day
Nicole Baker Peterson | 2023 | USA | 4 min | Cdn Premiere
It’s fine. Everything is fine.
Nicole Baker Peterson is an American-born experimental filmmaker and transmedia artist, working between digital glitch video and analogue film. She is also an educator, some-time programmer and the founder of the live-stream experimental film series Media Monsters. She has led courses in animation, experimental media, video production and beyond. Her award-winning work has been exhibited globally, from the streets of Mexico City to the CICA museum in South Korea.
When We Encounter the World
Leonardo Pirondi, Zazie Ray-Trapido | 2023 | Portugal/USA | 11 min | Cdn Premiere
In 1934 an experiment by an amateur-scientist couple began. Named after a genus of moths, the Automeris Project placed a group of young children in an enclosed forest, leaving them to fend for themselves. On return visits, the couple presented self-made films, accompanied by live music, depicting the outside world. For them, these images were the perfect replica of reality seen in their expeditions. Nevertheless, the films were carefully framed, edited and manipulated to induce a transformation and provoke the development of a new society. When We Encounter the World revisits the remains of the Automeris Project and recreates one such film made using the few remaining assembly notes.
Leonardo Pirondi is a filmmaker and artist born in São Paulo, Brazil. His films often inhabit realities that create friction between documentary and fictional structures; his filmmaking practice emerges from the fabulation of sociopolitical resonances within culture, myths, history, technology and image-making. His films have been exhibited in various festivals worldwide, including Toronto, Tiger Short Competition in Rotterdam, New York, Viennale, BFI London, Edinburgh, Melbourne, Guanajuato, Slamdance, True/False, Ambulante, Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin and others. He holds a degree in Film/Video from California Institute of the Arts and is a Sundance Institute Fellow.
Zazie Ray-Trapido is a filmmaker and producer from Philadelphia. Her films expand on traditional formats of documentary and narrative, focusing on the use of analog film techniques, archives and performance. Her practice investigates relationships between memory, ideology and the environment. Her work has been screened at festivals and venues worldwide such as International Film Festival Rotterdam, New York Film Festival, Viennale, Curtas Vila do Conde, Athens International Film and Video, Mimesis Documentary Festival, Maysles Documentary Center and others. She has participated in the Sundance New Frontier Lab, is a CalArts Research & Practice Fellow, holds a degree in Theatre and Performing Arts from Bard College and a Master’s in Film/Video from California Institute of the Arts.
Waiting Up to Meet the Wolf
Anthony Carr | 2023 | Canada | 7 min | Cdn Premiere
Waiting Up to Meet the Wolf is a quiet call to action for humanity to reverse the rapid decline of dark skies, told through personal memories of the dark from the director’s childhood and adult life. Coalescing the past, present and future, the film weaves these stories around those of the Moonlight Tower, a short-lived 19th century lighting technology. The film’s day as night ambient audio track, visual shakiness and interruptive transitions are designed to create a slightly off-kilter viewing experience, echoing the widespread confusion or “nocturnal jet-lag” felt by much of the animal kingdom when darkness is lost or altered. Shot on 16mm, the film was hand-processed using homemade eco-reversal techniques that complemented the subject matter; from charcoal development to car headlight exposure. The film owes its very existence to that which it laments, the presence of unwanted and at times uncontrolled light.
Born in London (UK), Anthony Carr is a Canadian-based visual artist working in photography, sculpture and the moving image. With a practice rooted in experimentation and process, he is particularly interested in and excited by the intersection of art and science, and with the alchemy of the analogue medium. Carr has exhibited throughout the UK and internationally in Europe, Asia, Australasia and North America. Screenings of Carr’s films in 2024 include Bideodromo International Experimental Film and Video Festival, Smaragdni Eco Film Festival, Buzz Cinema Festival and Desaturated with Analogue Ensemble. While recent gallery presentations include born of isolation (after Eric), a solo show at arc.hive artist run centre, Canada and You Are Welcome at Pat Martin Bates Gallery (Victoria Arts Council) Canada. Anthony Carr lives and works in Victoria on the unceded territories of the Lekwungen peoples.
Grandmamauntsistercat
Zuza Banasinska | 2024 | Poland/Netherlands | 23 min | Vic Premiere
Created from the Polish Educational Archive materials, Grandmamauntsistercat tells the story of a matriarchal family through the eyes of a child grappling with the reproduction of ideological and representational systems.
Zuza Banasińska is a visual artist from Warsaw, currently based in Amsterdam. Their essay films and installations utilize video, game engines, sound and sculpture to animate spectral realities sedimented within archives. The subsequent works create complex ecosystems that challenge unitary notions of identity, gender and representation. They studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Cracow, at the Universität der Künste in Berlin in the class of Hito Steyerl and at the Sandberg Instituut in Amsterdam. Their works have been shown in such spaces as the U-Jazdowski CCA in Warsaw, “Dům Umění Mesta Brna” in Czech Republic, “Blindside” in Melbourne, among others. In 2023 they were awarded the Artist Start grant from Mondriaan Fonds. Their work is also currently supported by the Netherlands Film Fund and Stimuleringsfonds.