Monday | Oct 19 | 6pm
Screening @ Deluge
Standing Prayer
In-Person Screening: Standing Prayer
Student/Older Adult $6 (use code 25OFF at checkout)
Watch Online Free: Tuesday, Oct 20 (24hrs)
안개의 열차 [Train of Mist]
Ji-hwan Kim | 2026 | South Korea/Switzerland | 10 min | Cdn Premiere
From inside the funicular heading to Harder Kulm, the landscapes in the foreground and background appear to shift at different speeds with the train’s motion. These vistas gradually accumulate, yielding various impressions. Train of Mist is the second film in Kim’s "landscape series,” which explores the relationship between time and perception via vehicles as a medium.
Ji-hwan Kim is a Seoul-based filmmaker and curator. He holds an MFA in Documentary Filmmaking from the Korea National University of Arts and is a founding member of Sorigrim, a collective dedicated to introducing moving image works to audiences in Korea. Moving between film and digital media, Kim’s practice begins with the physical and sensory qualities of film and expands toward ontological inquiries. His works have been presented at numerous film festivals, including Experimental Film and Video Festival in Seoul (EXiS), Festival des Cinémas Différents et Expérimentaux de Paris (FCDEP), Antimatter [media art], Split Film Festival, Beijing International Short Film Festival and DMZ International Documentary Film Festival.
Lure
Christopher Rohde | 2025 | Canada | 5 min | W Cdn Premiere
As the sun starts to set in a secluded wood, an unwelcome guest emerges from the periphery, drawn into a glittering snare. Time slouches, voices murmur from between the trees and corrosion starts ahead of schedule. Be careful out there. You might catch your death.
Christopher Rohde is an award-winning filmmaker from Ottawa, Ontario. Rhode received his MA in Film Studies from Carleton University in 2007. He was a member of Available Light Screening Collective from 2006 to 2013 and curated several programs including Stellar Regions: Jazz and Avant-Garde Film and Raw Power: Rock and Avant-Garde Film. From 2010 to 2014, he was Programmer at SAW Video Media Art Centre, where he curated screenings, installations, exhibitions, performances and other projects.
The Stream XV
Hiroya Sakurai | 2025 | Japan | 11 min | Cdn Premiere
Time dwells within all that flows.
I live in the Ogura-ike Reclaimed Land in Kyoto.
Wind, water and lines of cars pass across this land.
On the highway, time moves straight toward the future.
Yet there are places where time flows backward—rivers, forests, shrines and villages, where time returns to its source.
The echo of wind chimes that rang here a hundred years ago still resonates today.
Born in Yokohama and a pioneer of Japanese video art, Hiroya Sakurai is a professor at Seian University of Art and Design. His work has been included in exhibitions and festivals around the world including Sydney Biennale, Postwar Art in Japan at Getty Center, Melbourne International Film Festival, San Francisco International Film Festival, Japan Media Arts Festival and Stuttgarter Filmwinter. Sakurai’s work can be found in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada and J.Paul Getty Trust.
Standing Prayer II
Hugo Max | 2026 | Austria/UK | 4 min | W Cdn Premiere
A film prayer. Giraffes gather in an enclosure to usher a mysterious ritual.
Hugo Max is an Austrian-British filmmaker, painter and musician. He performs live improvised soundtracks to silent films on solo viola, regularly appearing at London's Prince Charles Cinema and Picturehouse Cinemas, and has devised performances at BFI Southbank, Austrian Filmmuseum and Locarno Film Festival. Max studied Fine Art at Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford (2020-23) and Film at Friedl Kubelka School for Independent Film (2024-25).
Rojo Žalia Blau [Red Yellow Blue]
Viktoria Schmid | 2025 | Austria | 10 min | W Cdn Premiere
Three locations, filmed over an extended period of time: Spain, a Baltic Sea resort in Lithuania and a forest in Lower Austria. While in the filmmaker’s earlier work, NYC RGB, the skyscrapers of the New York skyline are perceived as tricolour mountain ranges and the camera surveys a distinct landscape conceived by architects, Rojo Žalia Blau expands the perception of landscape and its representation, questioning what we understand as a “natural” space. Shadows shift, and seemingly unreal colour palettes open like lush bouquets of flowers or shimmering rainbows. A mountain guide who stands at a summit already knows every mountain by name, but in this case, our view is different: the trees and beaches in Rojo Žalia Blau remain anonymous, and the way in which we see and hear nature, as we remember and perceive it, are sharpened. (Marius Hrdy)
Viktoria Schmid works at the crossroad of cinema and installation art. Her chosen mediums of film, video, sculpture and photography act as co-authors and enter into a dialogue with the content. Medium-specific qualities shape her works, where she reflects on the spatial and social conditions of cinema, exhibition and public spaces. Schmid is interested in perception and influencing viewers’ everyday ways of seeing. Her practice focuses on historical image-making-processes, the potential for representing landscape and the historical development of cinema. Schmid has exhibited at International Film Festival Rotterdam; Künstlerhaus Graz, Austria and MONO NO AWARE NY, among others.
Of Swallows
Kelly Egan | 2025 | Canada | 3 min | NA Premiere
A swallow’s eye is longer than other birds. Their visual acuity is said to resemble Raptors. For sailors, swallows are a good omen signifying a close shore. My father loved birds. Since his passing I've felt afloat. Lost and unanchored. At sea in overwhelming emotions. I close my eyes and look for swallows, as metaphorical groundings.
Kelly Egan is an associate professor in Cultural Studies and Media Studies at Trent University whose work focuses on materiality and obsolescence, looking beyond hierarchical canonical and linear histories to probe new potentials for dead media.
She holds a Bachelor of Arts (2001) in Mass Communication from Carleton University, Master of Fine Arts (2006) in Film/Video from Bard College (2006), Certificate in Film Preservation from Selznick School of Film Preservation at George Eastman Museum (2012) and MA (2003) and PhD (2013) in Communication and Culture from York/Ryerson Joint Graduate Programme in Communication and Culture.
Her award-winning experimental films have exhibited extensively nationally and internationally at festivals/venues including Toronto International Film Festival, New York Film Festival, Edinburgh International Film Festival, Images Festival, Rotterdam International Film Festival, Cinematheque Quebecois, Pacific Cinematheque, TIFF Lightbox, Scotiabank Contact Photography Festival, George Eastman Museum, Anthology, Belvedere 21, Smart Museum of Art, Block Museum of Art, Northwest Film Centre, Antimatter, PleasureDome, IMA Institut für Medienarchäologie, Foreman Art Gallery, Struts Gallery, Espace Virtuel, Factory Media Centre, Evans Contemporary, amongst others. She has lived and worked in Peterborough, Ontario since 2014.
Buried in the Snow
Cherlyn Hsing-Hsin Liu | 2025 | USA | 20 min | Cdn Premiere
The world above ground and the world below.
Below the horizon, there exists a world that belongs neither to the present, future nor past, surrounded by boulders and waterfalls, where departed life secretly continues its activities. The spirits of those atomic life forms flow in the meandering water, formless yet remembering the past.
Above the horizon, all things that continue to live continue to live. A gust of wind blows, a flurry of snow falls, waiting for winter to pass, waiting for the sun to rise. Memory, like a giant tendril, rises from the ground, its roots seeping into the soil with the melting snow.
Having been here, yet never truly here. This is a film poem commemorating the passing of a dear friend from my youth. The poem was hand-engraved on a 400-foot-long roll of film.
Cherlyn Hsing-Hsin Liu is an artist, filmmaker and writer whose work is grounded in experimental literature, the conceptual avant-garde and philosophy. Liu's works are concerned with materiality in different contexts and eras, as well as its transformation, symbolism, decay and emotional resonance. For Liu, materiality includes both living and inanimate matter. Through film, poetry, painting, sculpture and other media, she reflects the light and darkness of the world she lives in. Her films have been shown at international festivals and museums including Edinburgh International Film Festival, Helsinki Festival, Festival des Cinémas Différents et Expérimentaux de Paris, Image Forum Festival, Japan, Istanbul International Experimental Film Festival, Museum of Kyoto, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, M+ Museum, Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Barbican Centre, among others.
Monday | Oct 19 | 8pm
Screening @ Deluge
Travellers’ Suite
In-Person Screening: Travellers’ Suite
Student/Older Adult $6 (use code 25OFF at checkout)
Watch Online Free: Tuesday, Oct 20 (24hrs)
déjà morts [already dead]
Ghada Sayegh | 2024 | Lebanon | 7 min | Vic Premiere
Spring 2020—during confinement, I had the habit of taking the car and going for a ride adjacent to the Beirut port. After August 4, this route was no longer possible. I did, however, sometimes go there and dare to take a shot, but not of the port. Just of a building opposite. To take these photographs, I had to turn my back to it. I took them stealthily. As if the city was daring me to take them. Today, the words of the first fragment of the collection of poems La fin du monde a déjà eu lieu (The End of the World Has Already Occurred) resurface in the images of this building, that of EDL (Électricité du Liban), an edifice in decrepitude, just like the institution it represents, long before the explosion that precipitated its decline.
Ghada Sayegh is a filmmaker and Associate Professor at IESAV, Saint Joseph University of Beirut and a member of the editorial board of the Montreal-based online cinema journal Hors Champ. Since 2021, she has been writing poetic fragments under the title The End of the World Has Already Occurred, which is evolving into an artistic project exploring the relationship between text and image. In 2024, she completed two experimental videos based on texts from this project: here afar and already dead. Her most recent film, météores..., is a found footage film composed of images from the Katsakh Mediterranean Archives, a personal collection of non-fiction Super 8mm and 16mm films capturing cities and villages across the Eastern Mediterranean from the 1930s to the 1980s, initiated by Chantal Partamian in 2020.
Glint
Anne Golden | 2025 | Canada | 4 min | BC Premiere
Glint is an exploration of fleeting moments and fractured realities. Through a collage of transient visuals and disjointed sounds, the video tries to capture the elusive shimmer of memory.
Anne Golden is an independent curator and writer whose programs have been presented at Musée National du Québec, Vtape and Queer City Cinema, among others. She is a member of the programming committee for Montreal Underground Film Festival. Golden has participated in numerous panels on curatorial practices, independent distribution and horror films. Golden is Artistic Director of Groupe Intervention Vidéo (GIV). She teaches in the Media Arts Department of John Abbott College. Her novel From the Archives of Vidéo Populaire (Pedlar Press) was released in March, 2016. She is Book Reviews Editor for Monstrum, a peer-reviewed journal of studies in horror and related areas.
Hansel and Gretel Get Kicked Out
MilleFeuille | 2026 | Canada | 12 min | Cdn Premiere
A found-footage détournement of retail-theft surveillance, in which the criminalizing gaze of the surveillance footage is subverted by recasting capitalism as an abusive, carceral parent. Quotes transcribed from YouTube creators who were kicked out of their homes as teens are repurposed to “speak back,” buttressed by “poor” low-resolution videos of stealing. Hansel and Gretel Get Kicked Out allegorizes capitalism—and the commodification of the self—by reconfiguring dissociated internet clips into a unified chorus of forlorn rage. Music from Flowers of Romance by Michel Henritzi.
MilleFeuille confections pre-existing, found footage into metaphors about ambient cruelty and decadent melancholia. Clips of random daily life are recast as scenes imbued with mythic allusions, and familiar locations are transformed into paradoxical spaces. The intention is not to subsume the original footage and its first context into a singular narrative or message, but rather to inhabit the slippery terrain of found-footage multivalence.
Suíte dos Viajantes [Travellers’ Suite]
Leonardo Pirondi | 2026 | Brazil/Portugal/USA | 7 min | Cdn Premiere
Forms of the universe, rocky landscapes and a green and lush human-made city. It originates from a dream I had; it is both mine and from a traveler aboard a spaceship. The dream and traveler belong within the world of my film Fractais Tropicais. Here, the hopeful and utopian human-centric imaginary of space travel and the future, filled with surveillance, control and illusions, all fleeting like the images a dream can contain.
Leonardo Pirondi is a Brazilian filmmaker based in Los Angeles. His films explore the infinite abyss between the multiple derived versions of reality through documentary, experimental and narrative modes. Much of his work uses analog and digital manipulations on celluloid to examine the sociopolitical unfoldings of the intersections between imagination, science, myth and technology.
His films have been exhibited at film festivals, institutions and venues internationally, such as International Film Festival Rotterdam, New York Film Festival, Viennale, BFI London, Melbourne, Edinburgh, Guanajuato, True/False, Ambulante, Curtas Vila do Conde, Wexner Center, REDCAT and others. His work exists in the collection of the UCLA Film and Television Archive, Cinematheque of the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro, and Film-Makers’ Cooperative in New York. He holds a Film/Video degree from CalArts, is a Sundance Ignite Fellow and is recipient of the Allan Sekula Social Documentary Fund and Tim Disney Prize for Excellence in the Storytelling Arts.
Memory: A Film that Tries to Remember Itself
Anton Paievski | 2026 | Austria | 6 min | NA Premiere
Using visual data extracted from found 8mm footage, the film attempts to reconstruct itself—bit by bit, colour by colour, line by line. This process unfolds through data visualization, tracing how images are absorbed, fragmented and remembered.
Born in Russia to a Ukranian/Tatar family, Anton Paievski lives in Vienna, studies in Angewandte and works as a film editor in various Viennese productions.
未命名菲林消毒怬划 [Untitled Film Disinfection Project I]
Lilan Yang | 2025 | China/USA | 3 min | W Cdn Premiere
“Censorship is the mother of metaphor.” Guided by state disinfection protocols, this 16mm structural film applies chlorine to imageless celluloid—transforming the chemical “sanitization” of film into a physical enactment of censorship, memory erasure and artistic resistance in response to China’s zero-COVID era.
Lilan Yang is an artist working with moving images across installation, film, photography and performance. Rooted in the materiality of 16mm, their practice explores the flux of migration, the decay of memory and the intricacies of perception.
Momentum
Nada El-Omari | 2025 | Canada/Palestine | 19 min | Vic Premiere
Momentum is the product of the mass and velocity of an object. It is the strength or force gained by motion or by a series of events. It is also what memories gain as time moves on. Twenty year after it was recorded, the course of a day resurfaces, still current today. As images are reassembled, people, places and voices shift and cross the eye of the camera—shaped by time, but not erased by it. What does it mean to hold proof, to possess the facts, but still struggle to be believed? What is the tension between evidence and emotion? Between what we see and what we choose to remember? In a world where truth is no longer enough, what does it take to truly witness—and what does it mean to care for stories long after the moment has passed?
Nada El-Omari is a filmmaker and writer of Palestinian and Egyptian origin based in Montreal. Her practice and research centre on the intergenerational transmissions of memories, displacement and stories of belonging and identity which she explores through a poetic, hybrid lens. Focusing on process and fragments in text, sound and image, Nada explores new ways to self-narrate, speak hybridity and self. Her films have been shown at festivals, on Shasha and Tenk and in galleries. Her work has also been published in Montreal Serai, qumra journal and Tantôt magazine. Her latest digital project was commissioned by the Art Gallery of Ontario in collaboration with Sonya Mwambu. Its latest iteration is a digital installation presented in the form of a two-player interactive experience. El-Omari holds a BFA in Film Production and an MFA in Film from York University.