Friday | Oct 27 | 6pm
Screening @ Deluge
Invisible World
Watch Online Free: Saturday, Oct 28 (24hrs)
Invisible World
Kym McDaniel | 2023 | USA | 5 min | Cdn Premiere
To apply for an accessible or Crip parking placard, a doctor within the state must approve the application. As part of the application, there are six medical conditions which qualify a person for a placard. Many people with disabilities are included in these categories, and many are not. This film is a record of my introduction to healthcare in the state of Utah. My processing of the appointment and consequential aftermath serves as a reclamation and assertion for understanding disability and the physical world.
Kym McDaniel is a queer, invisibly disabled, experimental filmmaker, choreographer and performer. She began working in video after a head injury changed her relationship to her body, dance and choreography. She uses image collages, text, gesture and the body to explore chronic illness, queerness/disability and structural dissociation. She is an AmSAT Alexander Technique teacher and has an MFA in Film, Video, Animation and New Genres from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
Love
Anna Hawkins | 2022 | Canada | 8 min | W Cdn Premiere
Love explores the shapeshifting nature of language on the internet. In the video, images extracted from Instagram—all found under #love—are transformed and integrated with original footage shot by the artist. #love is the most used hashtag on Instagram and currently there are over 2 billion posts tagged in this way. Connecting seemingly disparate images, Love tries to understand and link all of the possible associations of a given word at a single moment in time through narrative. A voiceless narrator—a loose personification of the Instagram platform or perhaps even the internet itself—addresses the viewer in the form of a love letter.
Anna Hawkins is an artist working primarily in moving image and installation. Her works centre around ways that images, gestures and language are circulated and transformed online and the impacts of technology on the intimate spheres of daily life. Recent exhibitions include solo projects at Dazibao (Montreal), Art Gallery of Alberta (Edmonton), The Bows (Calgary), Musée d’art contemporain des Laurentides (St-Jérôme), Eastern Edge (St. John’s) and Centre Clark (Montreal). Her works have been shown and screened internationally at UCLA New Wight Biennial (Los Angeles), WRO Media Art Biennale (Wrocław), LUX (London) and Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin. She is currently an Assistant Professor in Fine Art at MacEwan University on Treaty 6 Territory ᐊᒥᐢᑿᒌᐚᐢᑲᐦᐃᑲᐣ (Amiskwacîwâskahikan), Edmonton AB.
White Shoes
Simone Bethancourt | 2022 | USA | 7 min | W Cdn Premiere
A memory told from the perspective of a little girl meeting her father for the first time, and the gift he gives her before disappearing.
Simone Bethancourt graduated from the CalArts in 2022. White shoes is her thesis project.
Language Unknown
Janelle VanderKelen | 2022 | USA/Spain | 6 min | Cdn Premiere
Language Unknown embraces plant sentience as fact and speculates how beings of the vegetal variety might approach interspecies communication with humans (who are far more sensorially limited). Leaves, mycelium and roots playfully examine how humans experience the world, and the (supposedly) silent watchers consider what language those swift blurs of human might possibly understand.
Janelle VanderKelen is an artist, curator and educator currently based in Knoxville TN. Her films and intermedia installations imagine alternative acts of relation between imperfect bodies (human, vegetal, geological or otherwise) and make visible the agency of plants through experimental time-based media processes. VanderKelen’s work has been exhibited at institutions including the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, Anthology Film Archives in New York and Bow Arts in London, England. Her films have screened at Ann Arbor Film Festival, True/False, Athens International Film + Video Festival, Revelation Perth International Film Festival, IC DOCS, San Diego Underground Film Festival, and Antimatter. Recent awards include juried awards at the 2023 Ann Arbor Film Festival and the 2023 Thomas Edison Film Festival. Janelle was a Summer 2023 MacDowell resident and is currently working on new projects during a year-long Mary L. Nohl Fellowship. In addition to making time-based media, VanderKelen also co-curates a screening series called aCinema with Taka Suzuki.
Test Objects
Sam Drake | 2023 | USA | 9 min | Cdn Premiere
Inadequate attempts to describe a sensation; lingering seasickness and other terrestrial disorientations.
Sam Drake is a filmmaker and educator currently based in Milwaukee WI. She is an MFA candidate at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee where she is also the programmer of the Union Cinema.
Fighting Sleep
Kevin Obsatz | 2022 | USA | 6 min | World Premiere
A confession, set to adorable Super 8 images, about the dark moments of parenting a newborn.
Kevin Obsatz has been making movies for over 20 years and has been a parent for almost six years. Only recently has he been able to start making movies about parenting.
Patient
Lori Felker | 2023 | USA | 20 min | Cdn Premiere
Fiction, reality, the private and the performed overlap on a routine but emotional day at a medical centre.
Lori Felker is a filmmaker, teacher, programmer and performer. Her films study the ineloquent, frustrating and chaotic qualities of human interaction and have explored empathy, discontinuity, grief and multiple dimensions. She eschews any particular style or genre in favour of letting content and concerns guide form. Her award-winning short films, such as Spontaneous, Discontinuity and Imperceptihole and feature-length documentary FUTURE LANGUAGE: The Dimensions of VON LMO, have screened internationally at festivals including Rotterdam International Film Festival, Slamdance, Ann Arbor Film Festival, BAMcinemaFest, EXiS in Korea, Festival du nouveau cinema in Montreal and Kinodot in Russia. She loves every facet of filmmaking and has worked as a cinematographer, editor and/or actor for various artists and directors and has programmed for the likes of the Chicago Underground Film Festival, Slamdance and Roots & Culture Gallery in Chicago. She is a recipient of an Illinois Arts Council Grant, a Wexner Center Residency, a Brico Forward Fund and a Fulbright (Berlin). She is an Assistant Professor at DePaul University in Chicago.
Friday | Oct 27 | 8pm
Screening @ Deluge
Ashes of Roses
In-Person Performance: Ashes of Roses
Student/Senior $6 (use code 25OFF at checkout)
Watch Online Free: Saturday, Oct 28 (24hrs)
Echo
Moreña Patricia Bustillos | 2023 | USA | 12 min | Cdn Premiere
By appropriating the formal conceit of Hollis Frampton’s Nostalgia (1971), Echo celebrates structuralist cinema while expanding its horizons. Unlike Frampton’s original, Echo reverses the action of the series of personal photographs, burning on a heating-coil, allowing the voiceover to precede the image discussed, but also to meet, at last, with its flowering, unburned state, before the cycle begins again with the ash of the succeeding photo. While Nostalgia featured the work of two men, Echo is a collaboration between two women. Bustillos’s display and commentary on a series of Polaroids functions as a love letter to her subject, Sarah Evans, and to the formative subject of experimental, photochemical film, as yet vital in an age of virtual image-making and social media.
Moreña Bustillos is an educator and experimental filmmaker based in the Midwestern USA. Her work has been screened at such venues as the Soap Factory, Exit Art and Walker Art Center.
Bossburg
Roberto Santaguida | 2023 | Canada | 11 min | W Cdn Premiere
We talked, in our limited way, about the cosmos. Our childhood and other vulnerable periods popped up. We were fine with not knowing our true meaning if we were only a speck at the intersection of coping and pure suffering, we would try our best to make that speck twinkle.
Since completing his studies in film production at Concordia University, Roberto Santaguida’s films and videos have been shown at more than 400 festivals, including Tampere Film Festival (Finland), CPH: DOX Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival (Denmark), Contemporary Art Festival Sesc_Videobrasil (Brazil), Flickers' Rhode Island International Film Festival (United States), transmediale (Germany) and Message to Man (Russia). He has also taken part in artist residencies in numerous countries, including Iran, Romania, Germany, Norway and Australia. Roberto is the recipient of the K.M. Hunter Artist Award, the Chalmers Arts Fellowship and a fellowship from Akademie Schloss Solitude in Germany.
garden path
Big Top Collective | 2023 | Canada | 3 min | World Premiere
garden path dives deeply into a meditative engagement with the forest. Shot on black and white 16mm film and hand processed with coffee-based eco-developer, the film is the first part of Big Top’s new project Wild Forest, underlining the regenerative power of nature to offer hope in the face of climate change.
Big Top Collective is Trace Nelson and Peter Sandmark. Their media works often combine imagery captured from various sources while walking through forests, gardens or while travelling and feature gestural camera movements and hand painted film transformed in the post-production process via layering and abstraction. Trace Nelson is a multidisciplinary artist working in visual and media art and music who has exhibited her work in Canada, the USA and Europe. She has worked as an art educator over the past 28 years, teaching at Concordia University, Vancouver Island School of Art and the University of Victoria. Peter Sandmark has been creating single channel experimental film works since 1978. He has taught various filmmaking and film studies courses at Concordia University and the University of Victoria. Sandmark has also worked for media art centres in Canada such as Main Film and IMAA in Montreal and FLUX media gallery in Victoria. Nelson and Sandmark live and work in Victoria on the uncededed territory of the Lekwungen peoples
Delight at Robert St
Milja Viita | 2023 | Canada | 12 min | BC Premiere
Buddy, an old stray cat from Toronto, had managed to conquer a small territory of his own in the centre of the city. The filmmaker met Buddy’s gaze every time she went out. She befriended her neighbour and captured his last fall with her old 35mm hand cranked movie camera.
Milja Viita is a visual artist working with cinematic installations and films by using experimental and documentary material. Her works are characterized by memories and small and familiar phenomenons that are made significant by visual narration. Milja Viita´s film Animal Bridge U-3033 was awarded the Risto Jarva Prize at Tampere Film Festival in 2019. She holds a MFA degree from the Academy of Fine Arts, Department of Time and Space based Art.
Exterior Turbulence
Sofia Theodore-Pierce | 2023 | USA | 11 min | W Cdn Premiere
Seizure dreams, horses and long distance conversations from bed. Loose reenactments from Marguerite Duras’ Baxter, Vera Baxter. A year of stormy weather and temporal rupture recalled in fragments. Featuring my mother and other star-crossed lovers.
Sofia Theodore-Pierce is a filmmaker whose idiosyncratic narratives explore the spaces we inhabit, psychically and socially. Their non-fiction films seek to render the cyclical, digressive, often vulnerable nature of human conversation, either explicitly––audibly or visibly––or implicitly, through structural choices.
Ashes of Roses
Sasha Waters | 2023 | USA | 12 min | Cdn Premiere
This movie is about loving things that are embarrassing and people who are inappropriate. It’s an essay film reflection on popular trash, football parties, older men, adolescent desire and the outrageous yet mundane humiliations of being a teenage girl in the 1980s. With sound design by Kevin T. Allen and performance cameos by filmmakers Roger Beebe and Jason Livingston.
Sasha Waters is a moving image artist, feminist and professor at Virginia Commonwealth University. Her films are concerned with devotional practice—private obsessions, impossible dreams and spiritual or secular enthusiasms. She has screened and exhibited at film festivals, museums and galleries including Tribeca, Telluride, Rotterdam and SXSW, Brooklyn Museum, SF MoMA, LAXART, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Microscope Gallery and Film Forum NYC.