Monday | Oct 21 | 6pm
Screening @ Deluge
The Flesh of Language
Watch Online Free: Tuesday, Oct 22 (24hrs)
Stress Eating Time
Michael Bucuzzo | 2023 | Netherlands | 11 min | Cdn Premiere
Crushed under the unbearable weight of time, an airplane has an existential crisis and hijacks itself. Air travel cinema and luxury watch advertisements are reappropriated to explore the suspended zone between arrival and departure, life and death, technology and spirituality.
Michael Bucuzzo is an Amsterdam-based filmmaker and sound designer. Using experience borne out of the US commercial film industry, he explores the emotional architecture of popular media. Through a play of sonic textures, illusory set design and archival media, his work constructs atmospheric dream worlds. Michael’s films and performances have been included in festivals and venues such as European Media Art Festival, Eye International Conference, Onion City Experimental Film Festival and International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam. Michael is also a graduate of the Master of Film artistic research program at the Netherlands Film Academy.
for here am i sitting in a tin can far above the world
Gala Hernández López | 2023 | France | 19 min | W Cdn Premiere
A woman dreams of the American cryptographer Hal Finney. A major economic crisis affects the cryptocurrency market, tens of thousands of people are cryogenized awaiting a better future. Are they suspended or falling into the void? What strange relationship do we have with the future?
Gala Hernández López is an artist-researcher and filmmaker. Her work articulates interdisciplinary research with the production of essay films, video installations and performances on the new modes of subjectivation specifically produced by computational digital capitalism. She examines from a feminist and critical lens the discourses and imaginaries circulating in virtual communities as symptomatic fictions of a state of the world. Her work has been shown at Berlinale, DOK Leipzig, Cinéma du Réel, IndieLisboa, Transmediale and the Salon de Montrouge, among others. She is a PhD candidate at the University Paris 8, where she is developing a research-creation project on screen capture and where she has taught for three years.
The Act of Not Seeing with One’s Own Eyes
Markus Maicher | 2023 | Austria | 8 min | NA Premiere
I am a filmmaker, and a projectionist. Mostly I am a projectionist who doesn’t have time to make films. I projected so many images that my body got sick—severe chronic gastritis. I had to swallow a camera to see what was wrong inside me. The images that made me sick are the images that will help to make me well again. I did not make them, my body did. Through its automatic functioning, its convulsions, it produced images that you now see. Images, concrete and abstract, beautiful and repulsive, almost like one of Stan Brakhage’s films. But also the complete opposite: not handmade but auto-poetic, not analog but the newest digital technology, not silent but with sounds produced by the body of a musician, not square but very wide, no subject here, no inner visions, just my inner self.
Markus Maicher is a Vienna-based experimental filmmaker and media artist. His artistic practice investigates the cinematic dispositive and the material poetry of analog film and video. He also works as a projectionist at the Austrian Filmmuseum, is a PhD candidate at the University of Applied Arts Vienna and is part of the artist-run film lab filmkoop wien.
Umwelt/4470 – Part I
Charlie Tweed | 2024 | UK | 4 min | NA Premiere
Part of a new series of text and video based works which outline a set of speculative eco-technological spaces where human, non-human and technological relations are re-imagined via experimental amalgamations and new modes of interconnectivity. The title of the work makes reference to Jakob von Uexküll’s notion of the unique environment experienced by every form of life and this is juxtaposed with Ursula Le Guin’s notion of World 4470 where a sentient environment of interconnected intelligent plant life is discovered.
Charlie Tweed works in video, text and performance. His recent works have drawn attention to the complex impacts of global capitalism in terms of resource extraction, ecological destruction and the deployment of digital technologies to manage populations and environment. He employ strategies of re-appropriation and speculative fiction, often taking on personas of anonymous collectives and hybrid machines, to outline subversive plans for enhancing and escaping control mechanisms and renegotiating relations with the non human. Recent solo shows include: Notes From the Subsurface, EarthArt Gallery, Soon we will become output, Stanley Picker Gallery, i am algorithm at Aspex Gallery and Exeter Phoenix; Notes I, II & III at Spike Island, Bristol; Animate Projects and Alma Enterprises. His films have been screened internationally at venues including: ICA, CCA, Whitechapel Gallery, Watershed, Plymouth Arts Centre, CAFA, Quad, Derby, Eastside Projects, Castlefield, WRO Media Art Biennale, Aesthetica Film Festival and Rencontres Internationales.
The Flesh of Language
Amanda Rice | 2023 | Ireland/UK | 17 min | Cdn Premiere
The Flesh of Language establishes a parallel between interspecies and paranormal communication to engage with the barrier that typically separates science from esotericism—drawing connections between zoological research related to the extinct “Irish Elk,” parapsychologist Konstantin Raudive’s EVP tape recordings and tactics of media preservation as explained by an archivist. Rice’s disparate assemblage of found sound and image draw analogies between extinct deer and dying media formats which come to a head in a choreographed, exuberant species-resurrection scene.
Amanda Rice is an artist and filmmaker based between London and Belfast. Her films are a combination of observational documentary techniques, staged scenarios combined with modes of investigative storytelling which explore material histories related to ecological subject matter. Her films have been presented at Eva International Biennial, Flux Factory, Eastlink Gallery, CCA Glasgow, Arebyte Gallery, M8 Space Aalto University, Irish Film Institute, the Wrong Biennale and aemi's 2024 international touring film programme Spirit Messages.
Monday | Oct 21 | 8pm
Screening @ Deluge
Terminal Island
In-Person Screening: Terminal Island
Student/Older Adult $6 (use code 25OFF at checkout)
Watch Online Free: Tuesday, Oct 22 (24hrs)
I-80
Julia Rose Petrocelli | 2024 | USA | 6 min | Cdn Premiere
I-80 is a drive on the American road. Dirt and debris concealed in a layer of packing tape, enacted into movement, magnifies the road and its millions of travellers. Following a woman in the privacy of her 2001 Lexus.
Julia Petrocelli is an artist focusing on handmade filmmaking processes. She received her BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in the spring of 2024 and she attended the Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague, or FAMU, where she worked exclusively with 16mm film. Most of her work examines processes, archiving and collecting directly on the filmstrip, creating a singularity and ephemerality to her individual prints. She has shown her work in the Fluxus Museum, murmur contemporary, Katherine Small Gallery and more.
Landforms
Laura Kraning | 2024 | USA | 11 min | Cdn Premiere
Landforms unearths the physical remains of past and future geological strata. The film explores two landscapes, an industrial rock quarry turned recreational fossil hunting park, in which 380-million-year-old fossils were discovered beneath the rocks where once flowed a shallow sea, and a public waterway whose shore is dispersed with brightly colored fragments of consumer waste in the form of microplastics. Both landscapes reveal a process of digging and gathering, of collecting evidence of earth’s pre-historic past or intervening in humanity’s toxic futures. The forms, of ancient sea creatures and broken plastic, mesh and intertwine into a meditation on deep time and a reflection on extinction.
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.
Floods Recede to Luxury
Kathleen Rugh | 2023 | USA | 4 min | Cdn Premiere
Ten years after Hurricane Sandy flooded the DUMBO neighbourhood of Brooklyn, new luxury housing is built ever closer to the water’s edge, poised to ignore the risks of future storm surges. Using in-camera layered exposures, the film examines the neighbourhood in this time of transition and imagines what may still come.
Kathleen Rugh is a filmmaker and photographer based in Brooklyn, New York. Her film and photographic work has been exhibited in screenings and galleries throughout the US and internationally, including the Edinburgh International Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Images Festival, Antimatter [Media Art], EXiS Experimental Film Festival and Chicago Underground Film Festival. She has received funding for her films through the New York State Council on the Arts.
Grit
Phil Coy | 2024 | UK | 21 min | NA Premiere
Emerging from the increasingly murky depths of the sea, Grit navigates the peculiar shifting landscape of the aggregates industry—where materials formed over millennia, on a gradual passage to the bottom of the ocean, are dredged up and deposited back onto land to rise back up to form the buildings and architecture that surround us.
An artist/filmmaker, Phil Coy has shown his work at galleries, film festivals and for site-specific and public commissions in the UK and internationally including Matt’s Gallery, Hayward Gallery, Whitechapel Gallery, South London Gallery; Institute of Contemporary Arts, Annely Juda Fine Arts, Wilkinson Gallery, Ferens Art in London, FACT, Liverpool, Focal Point Gallery, Southend, Wysing Arts Centre, Corner House, Whitstable biennale, Ev+a biennale, the 58th + 59th BFI London Film Festivals, Artprojx Cinema, the Armory Show and LOOP Festival.
False Witness
Flo Yuting Zhu | 2024 | UK | 4 min | Cdn Premiere
False Witness is an imitation of found-footage horror indulging in the haunting lure of technological mystification through layers of processed footage and forging a cryptic absence. Blending wildlife trail cams, AI forgeries and dreamlike nigh-vision footage, the film’s narrative evolves uniquely through code-based randomization, existing in constant flux.
Flo Yuting Zhu is a London-based performance and film artist originally from Shanghai. Her work seeks the translation of absence/presence in moving images, computer algorithms and site-specific actions. Central to her practice is an investigation of the layered dynamics between the “witnessing” and the “witnessed,” often through the appropriation and subversion of popular art forms such as vlogs, livestreams, street games and homemade horror films. Zhu’s research and process are deeply rooted in verbatim materials and improvisational responses, often developed in collaboration with her co-creators, who are sometimes human, sometimes machine. Her work has been featured in notable festivals and exhibitions, including the Wuzhen Fringe Festival, Now Play This at Somerset House, Spectacle for Later at Rio Cinema, Sysco's Creative AI Challenge at Outernet and the London Short Film Festival.
Terminal Island
Sam Drake | 2024 | USA | 13 min | W Cdn Premiere
Los Angeles as a nexus for seismic rupture and ecological dread. A lament for vanishing palms and a sermon on Doomsday infrastructure delivered to no one. A radio broadcast, interrupted by an earthquake, speaks to hopeful solidarity.
Sam Drake is a filmmaker based in Milwaukee, WI. Her work has been exhibited at film festivals and venues including CROSSROADS, Alternative Film/Video, Collectif Jeune Cinéma, Non-Syntax Experimental Image, Winnipeg Underground Film Festival, Transient Visions Festival of the Moving Image and Antimatter. She has programmed for the UWM Union Cinema and Mini Microcinema and is currently an MFA candidate at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.