Friday | Oct 25 | 6pm
Screening @ Deluge
Patterns Against Workers
Unravelling the warp and weft of historical-material fabrics of technological infrastructure—natural, political and economic patterns from textiles to algorithmic networks.
Watch Online Free: Saturday, Oct 26 (24hrs)
Tape-stry
Rennie Taylor | 2023 | Canada | 2 min | W Cdn Premiere
Rip, cut, paste, repeat. Tape-stry is a short animation made with Japanese washi tape applied to 16mm film leader. Washi tape is a recent invention, created in the mid-2000s, known for its variety of colourful decorative designs. The film layers numbers, cartoon cats and geometric shapes and text.
Rennie Taylor is a multidisciplinary artist based in Toronto. His practice focuses on the everyday with an emphasis on nostalgic signs and symbols found in popular culture. Engaging in the practices of photography, filmmaking, animation, collage and illustration he explores themes of consumerism, the handmade and obsolescence. He investigates decay within technology which corresponds to his material manipulation of celluloid, ephemera and found objects. His works have been screened across Canada and Internationally in Argentina, Brazil, France, Germany, Japan, Mexico, Serbia and the United States at festivals such as Antimatter Media Art, Dresdner Schmalfilmtage and Engauge Experimental Film Festival.
Larksong
Nick Jordan, Jacob Cartwright | 2023 | UK | 19 min | Cdn Premiere
Larksong is an exploratory documentary that journeys through a landscape on the edge of Pennine Moors in Northern England. With an 18th century nonconformist chapel as a central motif, the film captures a distinctive history and topography, laced with the imprints of the traditional textile workers, mills and industries that shaped the environment.
Jacob Cartwright and Nick Jordan's collaborative practice is cross-disciplinary, encompassing film, drawing, painting, photography, objects, publications and events. Their work explores the interrelations between the natural world and our multifaceted cultural and social histories.
Cartwright and Jordan's work has been exhibited widely, through exhibitions, film festivals, international residencies and public commissions. Film festivals include FIDMarseille (France); BFI London (UK); Documenta Madrid (Spain); New York Film Festival (USA); Rencontres Internationales, Berlin (Germany); lndieLisboa (Portugal); Kassel Dokfest (Germany); Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival (France).
The artists are based in Manchester, UK.
World Wide Web
Tori Sommerhof | 2024 | USA | 6 min | Cdn Premiere
Webs have a unique relationship with light that has barely been acknowledged. Spiralling through another world full of secret beauty, mystery and spine-chilling arachnid activity, this film illustrates the tiny performance art found all around us but seldom acknowledged. Meditations in the tangled centre of the network of the spider. Nerve cords tessellate across the screen and webs collapse buildings and bridges. Data.
Tori Sommerhof is an experimental filmmaker from Baltimore currently living in San Francisco. Tori makes video art exploring inner realities. They take inspiration from everything; mainly dreams, music, experiences and encounters. Tori's art is made of abstract, low-fidelity images, woven like a web. They believe image fatigue from the internet gives video art the potential to be phantasmagorical and avant garde, as well as meditative, ecause video art creates an elevated relationship between the viewer and the image. Tori makes viewers actively experience the information presented with distortion, defamiliarization and abstraction.
Michif Land-Based Knowledge
Robyn Adams | 2024 | Canada | 3 min | BC Premiere
Weaving shots of historical and contemporary Métis beadwork with intricate flashes of prairie landscape and native plants, this film explores relationship to the land through a place-based tactile knowledge.
Robyn Adams is a Red River Métis citizen of the Manitoba Métis Federation. Her Métis family is from la Rochelle and St. Pierre-Jolys, Manitoba. She is a multidisciplinary artist interrogating relationships with family, land and water through the intricate weaving of Indigenous histories, knowledge, ceremony, art and architecture. Robyn enjoys fishing, medicine picking, beadwork and making things with her hands and seeks to create an architecture of poetic joy, alongside the matriarchs that have helped steward a sense of home for Indigenous communities through the dark times so that we may be able to forge paths into brighter futures.
Patterns Against Workers
Olena Newkryta | 2023 | Austria | 34 min | Cdn Premiere
From the loom to digital code, from the architectural organization of factories to the computer chip, Patterns Against Workers delves deep into the historical-material fabrics of technological infrastructures that determine contemporary conditions of labour. Tirelessly swiping and scrolling through archival documents, images and online maps, a hand traces the economic, political and engineering forces which manifest in the operating systems of our glowing screens. There, behind the surface, the repetitive patterns of weave codes, datasets and orchestrated gestures echo the all-pervasive methods of extraction that not only penetrate algorithmic networks but also deserted landscapes and sleepless bodies. Patterns Against Workers addresses the state of collective exhaustion not only as a pathologic symptom of capitalism’s exploitative forces, but as a socio-political condition that bears the potential for resistance—by becoming radically unruly.
Olena Newkryta is a Ukrainian visual artist and filmmaker based in Vienna. Her practice is informed by the socio-political, historical and material dimensions of spaces, images and technological infrastructures. Her work has been presented at international exhibitions, screenings and biennials, including WRO Media Art Biennale, EYE Filmmuseum Amsterdam, Duisburger Filmwoche, Singapore International Film Festival, Diagonale – Festival of Austrian Film, Kunsthalle Wien, Kyiv International Short Film Festival, Filmmuseum Wien, Temporary Gallery Cologne, Dokumentarfilmwoche Hamburg, Kunsthaus Graz, Lentos Kunstmuseum and A Tale of A Tub Rotterdam.
Friday | Oct 25 | 8pm
Screening @ Deluge
Purple City
Celebrations of desire and appetite reappropriate, hijack and queer tropes of popular culture to unveil secret identities.
In-Person Screening: Purple City
Student/Older Adult $6 (use code 25OFF at checkout)
Watch Online Free: Saturday, Oct 26 (24hrs)
Malfunctions
Julie Anne Sando, David Bergeron | 2024 | Canada | 5 min | Cdn Premiere
Through sampling, glitch editing and pitch play, Malfunctions combines early newsreels and Harvard University science footage of actual, imminent hazards: past disasters that foreshadow present current environmental and infrastructural crises. Connecting this cinematic collage is a remix of Mae West’s intensely sexualized version of a 1913 song by Black Canadian composer Shelton Brooks, from the film She Done Him Wrong (1933). Radically slowed, West’s mournful, sensual voice transforms loss and longing into a haunting stillness played out over oddities in the news.
A lens-based visual artist from Windsor, Ontario, Julie Sando works with both still and moving images. Recent bodies of work include the exhibition (he called me his) Fully Transistorized Baby, which was inspired by the collection of vinyl records and amateur radio enthusiast magazines and Nightshades, a photographic series derived from vintage pantyhose packaging. In 2019 she collaborated with composer David Bergeron on Rollerbabies (of Paradise), a satire on Hollywood “romance” films and a dystopian science-fiction themed pornographic film.
David Bergeron is a Vancouver-based musician who makes experimentally driven ambient music under the alias Quiet i. His style and sonic output are informed by emotion, improvisation and communication which resonates well with film and installation art.
Boys! Boys! Boys!
Dina Yanni | 2024 | Austria | 14 min | NA Premiere
Elvis dreams of an alternative reality in which previously strict gender norms are mocked and his queer desires are eventually fulfilled—a détournement of the white playboy stereotype in the Elvis movies.
Dina Yanni is a video artist and researcher whose work is heavily influenced by popular culture, digital image manipulation and critical theory. Through compilation and analysis of existing footage, experimental editing and data corruption, Yanni strives to reveal, reevaluate and reframe power structures discovered in the original materials. Dina Yanni holds a PhD in Political Science and an MA in Film Production. Her work has been exhibited at experimental film and video art festivals internationally.
The Spectacle of Her Appetites
Sue Ding | 2024 | USA | 5 min | Cdn Premiere
A found footage meditation on eating your feelings. Appropriating footage from popular films and television, The Spectacle of Her Appetites articulates this trope’s pervasiveness and visual codes, as well as its reproduction of conventional paradigms of femininity. A reimagined soundscape invites viewers to consider these images anew, alternately humanizing, absurd and disturbing.
Sue Ding is a filmmaker and visual artist based in Los Angeles. Her work explores race, gender and diaspora through the lens of visual culture and place-based poetics. In her research-based approach, she emphasizes process, form and deep readings of media and landscapes. Sue directed the short documentary The Claudia Kishi Club, which premiered at SXSW and was acquired by Netflix, and an Emmy Award-winning episode of the docuseries Artbound. Her films have screened at IDFA, Copenhagen Contemporary and Miami Art Basel, and have been featured in Vice, Indiewire and Sight and Sound. In 2023, she was named one of Filmmaker Magazine’s “25 New Faces of Independent Film.” Her interdisciplinary practice spans film, installation and emerging media.
Teen Girl Fantasy
Marisa Hoicka | 2023 | Canada | 10 min | BC Premiere
Hormones pulsate to the rhythm of fourth-period marching band practice. Cheer for the boys! Stay upbeat! Feel the rush of desire! Breathe the rage in deep. Make sure you aren’t late for the bell or he might make you stay after school, alone together. These are the lurking aggressions in Teen Girl Fantasy. But whose fantasy was it anyway? Created with the aid of a grant from the Writer’s Union of Canada for Hoicka to write her original script under the mentorship of Canadian poet Nikki Reimer.
Marisa Hoicka (Canada) creates films, choreographs dancers, performs installations and paints. Her film Teen Girl Fantasy was included in International Film Festival Rotterdam’s 2024 Tiger Short Competition (Netherlands), Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Cinema (Argentina), Palm Springs International Short Film Festival (USA), Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (Czechia), Curtas Vila do Conde International Film Festival (Portugal), Guanajuato International Film Festival (Mexico), Concorto Film Festival (Italy) and SFMediatheque’s Crossroads (USA). She has also exhibited in major festivals and museums including Uppsala Short Film Festival, Vancouver International Film Festival, Images Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, San Francisco MoMA and the Power Plant.
Les fleurs du mâle
Hadi Moussally | 2023 | France | 4 min | W Cdn Premiere
“The mysterious creature, Salma, realizes that being herself has repercussions on her life and that she will never be accepted as she is. So she decides to ask the creatress of this world for mercy.“ Shot in Super 8 and edited in-camera, the film was inspired by the letter sent by Charles Baudelaire to the Empress Eugenie after being censored and fined for his book Les fleurs du mal. The reason of the condemnation: offence to public morals and good manners as well as offence to religious morality.
Hadi Moussally is a Lebanese filmmaker and photographer living and working in Paris. Mousally received two Masters degrees in Cinematography from Paris Universities (Université Paris 10 – Paris Ouest Nanterre and the Université Paris Est Marne la Vallée). He has directed and scripted more than 30 movies including short narrative and experimental films, music videos, fashion films and documentaries. He founded h7o7Films, a production company with Olivier Pagny in Paris, as well as The12Project and The First Alternative Fashion Network.
Purple City
Noam Gonick, Michael Walker | 2023 | Canada | 20 min | BC Premiere
Dance, animation and re-enactments unveil the lost identities of models used by Georges Gardet for Winnipeg’s Eternal Youth (the “Golden Boy”). The artwork’s secret identity as Hermes and the Two-Spirit and queer hustling legacies of the legislative grounds are revealed, as is Purple City—an LSD teenage ritual.
A filmmaker and artist, Noam Gonnick has an enduring interest in social activism, sexuality and our connections across racial and class divides, often influenced by the palette of his hometown, Winnipeg. Uprisings, protests, marches and dancing are recurrent motifs across a variety of media. His interests include eco-restoration, with the establishment of Camp Kitigay on the shores of Lake Winnipeg in collaboration with the Brokenhead Ojibway nation.
An art photographer with a worldwide following on social media, Michael Walker’s work is primarily self-portraiture with a focus on his own body within a domestic sphere. In university he enrolled in Gender Studies and one highlight of his career to date was meeting James Bidgood (Pink Narcissus) to discuss a collaboration. Purple City is his first film, both as an actor and director.