Friday | Oct 24 | 6pm
Screening @ Deluge
This Immeasurable Sea
Exile and exodus: poetic interrogations of identity, fractured narratives and existential disillusion.
Watch Online Free: Saturday, Oct 25 (24hrs)
I Was There
Kamila Kuc | 2024 | Poland/UK/USA | 12 min | Cdn Premiere
I Was There is a haunting exploration of familial bonds, intergenerational memory and the enduring impact of shared narratives. Filmmaker Kamila Kuc steps into the emotional stream of inherited family history as the lines between documentary, testimony and fiction blur. She performs acts of bearing witness not just for herself but also on behalf of her grandmother. Together, they testify to their experiences and the reverberations these stories have over time. I Was There is a palimpsest—a layered tapestry where past and present intertwine in the intimate process of activating memory and vulnerability as forms of resistance. I Was There honours the testimonial object inherited from ancestors and the living connection that binds generations in the shared pursuit of justice and healing.
Kamila Kuc is a Polish-born filmmaker, based between London and Seattle. Her hybrid media practice stems from the belief that although we are unable to change our pasts, we have the power to shape our future narratives. Set within the realm of social choreography, her work considers complex ways to relate to one another through embodied, care and trust-building practices that foster collaboration and co-creation. She is the Founder and Director of Dark Spring Studio, a London-based production company dedicated to the creation and distribution of artist moving image works that are committed to social change. Her films have screened at many festivals and galleries worldwide including Edinburgh International Film Festival, CROSSROADS, Ann Arbor, Anthology Film Archives New York, Studio Gallery, Warsaw, Whitechapel Gallery, BFI, ICA, London and the National Gallery, Washington DC.
This Immeasurable Sea
Alex Broadwell | 2025 | USA | 14 min | Cdn Premiere
An author finishes one book and plans another, aiming to convey her disillusionment with common understandings of time. An interleaved puzzle-box collage of literary and cinematic echoes, amid fluid landscapes of a western coast.
Alex Broadwell is a filmmaker originally from Farmville, North Carolina, working in both analog and extremely digital formats in hybrid genres. His film/video works explore the tangled quality of time and the dialectic of experience and reflection.
Letter from Blackhawk Island
Derek Jenkins | 2024 | Canada/USA | 2 min | W Cdn Premiere
From her home in Blackhawk Island WI, poet Lorine Niedecker traded lively and impactful letters with numerous peers, most notably Louis Zukofsky and, later, Cid Corman. After a brief sojourn in New York, she lived alone in a one-room cabin for much of her adult life, walking several miles to nearby Fort Atkinson to work as a copy editor at a dairy industry newsletter until failing eyesight reduced her to menial labour. Niedecker connected to the outside world by post, and among the small shelf of books she kept for herself were several collections of letters, including those of the composer Franz Liszt and his lover, the scholar Marie Catherine Sophie, Comtesse d'Agoult. Letter from Blackhawk Island assembles images and sound gathered on the small plot of land by the Rock River where Niedecker lived, along with ambient audio from the only existing recording of the poet’s voice, into the filmmaker’s own condensed missive of prismatic correspondences.
Derek Jenkins is a motion picture photographer born in Monroe, Louisiana. His practice is handmade, personal and documentary, with an interest in labour, ecology and technology—specifically the reciprocal relationships between tools, materials and ways of knowing. He received a BA and an MA in English from the University of Arkansas, and an MFA in Documentary Media from Toronto Metropolitan University. His films, including Contents (2018), The Shouting Flower (2019), Livestock (2019), and Grounders (2020), have been exhibited at festivals, museums and galleries, including DocLisboa, Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival, McMaster Museum of Art, ARKIPEL – Jakarta International Documentary and Experimental Film Festival, Antimatter, the8fest, FRACTO Experimental Film Encounter, Photophobia, Media City, Experiments in Cinema, Mimesis Documentary Festival and non-syntax Experimental Image Festival, among many others. He lives and works in Hamilton, Ontario.
Il tempo difficile
Mattia Biondi | 2024 | Italy/Spain | 11 min | Cdn Premiere
During a stay in Spain, on the brink of an abyss that is anything but metaphorical, the writer Emil Cioran turns to a friend to share daily concerns and existential reflections.
Mattia Biondi is an Italian independent filmmaker who works “at the end” of the images. His research is based on the use of minimal and essential technical instruments and it is oriented towards the development of creative processes concerning the fusion of archival material and autobiographical elements.
Marratein, Marratein
Julia Yezbick | 2025 | Lebanon/USA | 25 min | Cdn Premiere
A series of letters to a maternal ancestor reflect on the ways identity is connected to ethnic heritage, while also embracing a broader notion of family beyond bloodlines. Marratein (meaning “twice” in Arabic) explores the intertwined themes of diaspora, belonging and the fragmented memories of places known only through stories and ancestral ties. Weaving images and sounds from the filmmaker’s personal ties to two cities—Detroit and Beirut—the film poses the central question: How do we belong to each other?
Julia Yezbick is a filmmaker, artist and anthropologist. She received her PhD in Media Anthropology and Critical Media Practice from Harvard University and an MA in Visual Anthropology from the University of Manchester. Yezbick’s creative practice is primarily one of experimental nonfiction addressing topics of labor, movement and the body, feminism and social commentary on issues ranging from ethnicity and gender to housing and urban transformations. Her work uses film, video, audio, writing and installation, and has been exhibited at various international festivals and venues including the Berlin International Film Festival, Art Gallery of Ontario, New York Library for Performing Arts, Station Arts Space, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Broad Underground Film series, AgX Film Collective, Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit and Grand Rapids Art Museum. Yezbick lives and works in Detroit where she directs Mothlight Microcinema and is an Assistant Professor of Media Arts and Studies at Wayne State University.
Friday | Oct 24 | 8pm
Screening @ Deluge
Split Horizon
Psychedelia through psychogeography—traversing fragmented and formalized landscapes in a teleological technocracy.
Watch Online Free: Saturday, Oct 25 (24hrs)
Sandia
Melissa Faivre | 2025 | Germany/USA | 8 min | W Cdn Premiere
Sandia is an exploration of the multiple facets of the Sandia mountain range located in New Mexico. It reveals the mountain’s cold and hostile peaks and slopes in contrast to the warm and arid desert at its base. Aesthetically, the digital image is altered and mystified by techniques reappropriated from the tradition of experimental films, such as frame by frame printing, painting, collage and scratching.
Mélissa Faivre, born in France, is an experimental video artist based in Berlin. Her contemplative and mesmerizing work seeks to provoke questions on the nature of perception. By experimenting with editing techniques, she creates images that present blended and distorted realities that seek to test the temporal and spatial co-ordinates foundational to the perceptive experience.
Hypnagogia
Cecilia Araneda | 2024 | Canada | 5 min | Vic Premiere
In the threshold between sleep and wake, hallucinations and moments of paralysis take hold. Hypnagogia is an exercise in eco-processing, with different 16mm B&W film stocks processed with multiple different organic material, including apples, avocado peel, coffee, grapes, peaches, pomegranate and wine.
Chilean-Canadian filmmaker and curator Cecilia Araneda’s works have screened at festivals and venues such as Visions du Reél, Rotterdam, Ann Arbor, Jihlava, Uppsala, Festival du Nouveau Cinéma, Images and TIFF Wavelengths. Aesthetically, Araneda’s art practice is strongly rooted in the examination of private and public memory as it connects to identity, consciously working against the idea of the fully controlled image. Her family’s experience fleeing Chile’s military dictatorship also plays a large role in her body of work. Most well-known for her work in analogue film, Araneda works in experimental, documentary and fiction forms.
Anomalie dans le paysage [Anomalies in a landscape]
Félix Caraballo | 2025 | Canada | 8 min | Cdn Premiere
Anomalies in a landscape is a film in four tableaux—four audiovisual landscapes that unfold in all their strangeness. Spices, leaves and local seaweed reveal and imbue with their hues this film shot and developed on the banks of the Magtogoek/St. Lawrence river.
Félix Caraballo is a filmmaker and visual artist based in Tiohtià:ke/Montreal and N’dakina/Marieville. His work explores landscapes through the unique materiality of analog film. His latest short, Anomalie dans le paysage, is distributed by Light Cone (Paris).
Alpine Tundra
Kathleen Rugh | 2025 | USA | 6 min | Cdn Premiere
At an elevation of 14,264 feet above sea level, the peak of Mount Blue Sky is too harsh for trees and common vegetation. Instead, the ground is covered with fragile tundra grass, weak soil and rock. In this harsh climate exists the highest paved road in North America, that allows visitors traveling by car to partake in striking views and a sense of awe in the extremes of nature.
Kathleen Rugh is a filmmaker based in Brooklyn, New York. Her films have screened throughout the US and internationally, including the Edinburgh International Film Festival, Ann Arbor, Images Festival, Antimatter, Fracto Experimental Film Encounter and the Chicago Underground Film Festival. Rugh is an Assistant Professor of Film at Kean University in Union, NJ.
Split Horizon
Lauren Marie Dake | 2025 | USA | 11 min | Cdn Premiere
Split Horizon is an optically printed 16mm impressionistic handmade film. Using found home movies and travel films from the 1960s, I respond to the material through collage, painting and abstraction directly onto film, aiming to create a psychological traversal across a vast unknown. Landscape acts as a basis for exploration, and characters emerge and descend, representing the self or the other. The onscreen horizon is often literally split; the characters and places become a mirror for one another, meditating on our own ability to contain multiple versions of self, identity and internal narratives about our own stories, paths and histories.
Lauren Marie Dake is an experimental filmmaker and educator from Seattle. Her practice centres on notions of escape, chaos, the uncanny and the ethereal. She is fascinated with the world-building potential of handmade and cameraless cinema and experiments with direct animation onto 16mm films, where she engages in an ongoing attempt to create new realities within the dimension of the frame. Lauren’s films have recently screened at the Grrl Haus Cinema Best of 2024 Festival in Cambridge MA, MicroActs Artist Film Screenings in London, International Avant-Garde Film Festival in New York and Boston Short Film Festival.
Learn More About Lauren Marie Dake’s Work at Automat
Ochlockonee Split
Dave Rodriguez | 2025 | USA | 4 min | Cdn Premiere
Inspired by Bill Brown and Thomas Comerford’s Chicago Detroit Split (2005), Ochlockonee Split deploys unslit double 8mm film to traverse the span of Ochlockonee Bay on Florida’s gulf coast. A sonic collage of local field recordings and a handheld, malfunctioning camera capture a fragmented portrait of the estuary at low tide—where the boundaries between land and sea, life and death, growth and decay and our own sense of spatial orientation briefly collapse across the brackish water held between duelling images.
Dave Rodriguez is a media artist originally from Miami FL and currently based in Bloomington IN. His single-channel video, 16mm film and live expanded cinema work has been screened/performed in festivals and galleries across Europe and the Americas including Ann Arbor Film Festival, Antimatter, FLEX Film/Video Festival, Cosmic Rays, Mono No Aware, Strangloscope, FONLAD, Onion City Film Festival, Odds & Ends Experimental Film Festival, Florida Film Festival and others. His writing has been published in Found Footage Magazine, Islandia Journal and The Miami Rail.
Where Are the Wild Things?
Benjamin Clement | 2023 | Norway/USA | 3 min | W Cdn Premiere
An experimental film exploring the dissonance between the romanticization of natural landscapes and the reality of a technological and modern world. Filmed in the forests and fjords surrounding Oslo, Norway, this film juxtaposes idyllic, untouched, “natural” landscapes with moments from my day to day life in the cityscape of Oslo and cyberspaces online in order to challenge notions of Norwegian romanticism and nationalism in relation to nature. Made by screenprinting iPhone footage and found videos onto strips of 16mm film with acrylic and bleach, then combining the screenprinted frames with 16mm filmed footage of Norwegian forests.
Ben Clement is a New York-based director and animator from Rhode Island. He works primarily with what he calls “printed films,” a process of direct animation that uses the technique of screenprinting onto strips of 16mm film. His work specializes in film installation, visuals and music videos.
endings
Phil Hoffman, Isiah Medina | 2023 | Canada | 9 min | W Cdn Premiere
endings “…brings to the screen the essential elements of natural life in parallel with the essence of cinema: image, sound (and its absence), editing. The apparent simplicity of the image is contrasted with an intricate, associative, rollercoaster-like editing punctuated by the presence and absence of sound.” – Ribalta Film Festival, Italy 2025
Director, filmmaker and editor Isiah Medina is a Canadian experimental filmmaker from Winnipeg, Manitoba. He is the founder of the Toronto-based production company Quantity Cinema. Medina is known for his radical approach to intellectual montage and the cut, philosophy and mathematics. Philip Hoffman is a filmmaker and photographer who has gained recognition thanks to his film diaries. Hoffman’s recent work makes use of flowers and plants to process celluloid. Both artists share interest in analogue film, the consequence of which may be seen in the film they collaborated on, Vulture (2019).