Watch Online Free: Sunday, Oct 18 (24hrs)

Nothing in Particular (Unboxing Video)

Morgan Adamson | 2026 | USA | 8 min | Cdn Premiere

A woman in Minneapolis reflects on becoming a new mom in the upheavals of 2020 through a seemingly banal object: cardboard. Combining stop motion animation with live action, this experimental essay unpacks the messiness of everyday life through the desires both revealed and hidden when we open the box.

Morgan Adamson is a scholar-practitioner who works at the intersections of non-fiction film and cultural studies. Grounded in archival research and collaboration, her experimental cinematic practice animates hidden histories and infrastructures as a form of social engagement situated in place. Her films have screened at festivals, galleries and museums nationally and internationally. Her medium-length documentary, Brutal Utopias (2023), is now streaming as part of the Minnesota Experience series on Twin Cities Public Television. She is the author of a book on radical cinema and the essay film, Enduring Images: A Future History of New Left Cinema (University of Minnesota Press: 2018), in addition to numerous scholarly and popular essays on histories of finance, race and geographies of dislocation and social reproduction. Her work has been reviewed in Cineaste, Film Quarterly and Hyperallergic, among other places. She is currently Professor and Chair of Media and Cultural Studies at Macalester College.

fracture summer

Kym McDaniel | 2026 | USA | 9 min | Cdn Premiere

The choreography of an injured summer. Sunlight moves through rooms, my period marks time passing and PTSD rearranges the clock. My broken Super 8 camera needs to be shaken for the shutter release to catch, and I wonder how to stay functioning, myself. The document of being unable to walk during an especially Crip summer inside my apartment.

Kym McDaniel is an interdisciplinary artist working across fields of moving image, choreography and disability studies. Her embodiment as a dancer living with chronic pain informs her to relationship to time, the body and movement in her work. She has recently screened within exhibitions at the Ann Arbor Film Festival, Slamdance, Antimatter, ICDOCS, The Whitney Humanities Center, Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival and at UnionDocs, among others. She is currently an Assistant Professor in Dance Film and Digital Technologies within the Dance Department at Ohio State University.

Millstone

Bocheng Zhang | 2024 | China | 5 min | Cdn Premiere

Millstone takes its cue from the workers’ steady, exact grinding—motion as endurance. Projection, workshop tools and mirrors made during the Cultural Revolution assemble into a site-responsive “vision machine” that settles inside the workshop and learns its rhythm. The objects collaborate, but they also scrape and strain against one another, marking the space with traces—of desire, of longing. Out of this labouring friction, a live-captured interactive image is projected back into the room, calling up a spectre of shared memory.

Bocheng Zhang is a filmmaker from Tianjin, China. He received his BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is currently pursuing an MFA in Film at the University of Colorado Boulder. Zhang traces the faint seam between bodily pain and repressed history. He lingers on microscopic sites—small surfaces, residues and fragments—looking for where the body has pressed into the world and where the world presses back. Across digital video, analog film and found objects, he constructs site-responsive “vision machines”: apparatuses that live with a place and learn its rhythms. Ordinary materials gather, shift and bind into unlikely constellations, carrying the afterimage of touch, desire and longing.

ABEL

Brian Zahm | 2025 | USA | 20 min | Cdn Premiere

"It was kind of a surprising, surprising event…”

Abel Berumen, an accomplished Mexican-American photographer, woke up blind one day as a result of a rare disease called Pseudoxanthoma Elasticum. This film, made seven years after the unexpected event, reflects on the paradox of his disability: how his loss of vision has enabled him to truly see.

Brian Zahm is an award-winning interdisciplinary artist whose work has been exhibited worldwide and locally at Chicago International Film Festival, Chicago Underground Film Festival, Reeling: The Chicago LGBTQ+ International Film Festival, Chicagoland Shorts: Volume 2, Chicago Onscreen Movies in the Parks and Peripheries Experimental Film & Video Festival. Riding the analog-to-digital wave for three decades, he works in narrative, documentary and experimental filmmaking, performs/produces electronic music and indulges in photography and graphic design. Having spent much of his career working in the commercial film and media industry, over the past several years his reputation has grown as a prolific outsider artist due to bold and diverse stylistic explorations, continually striving for cinematic innovation. To do this he cross-pollinates concepts and techniques from any number of disciplines to create a timeless, unforgettable experience through his work, this aim cemented with the feature experimental documentary Headspace: The Sound of Life, for which he was the writer, cinematographer and editor—the film called “visionary” by The New York Times.

Inchoatracies or Everything Is as It Goes in Anterograde

Zack Parrinella | 2024 | USA | 2 min | W Cdn Premiere

An antagonizing balance between the existence and perception of things.   

Zack Parrinella is a film enthusiast, making films at times by hand processing in darkrooms and other times by working with commercial film labs, and usually both. His work often centres around dissonance and decay, sometimes more lighthearted and sometimes more anxious.

Domestic weights and measures

Paul Tarragó | 2026 | UK | 19 min | Cdn Premiere

An almost diary, featuring cats and bats, a hearse and horses, and much animation. Backdropped by a community arts project, the “our planet in motion” orrery kit and a new take on timelapse. All elements locally sourced. Experimentally friendly and audience curious.

Paul Tarragó is a filmmaker, using both video and celluloid, living in London. His work is a mix of underground experimentation and metafiction, tugging at the leash of film language but with narrative often held close at hand.

His work has shown widely on film festival and gallery circuits (International Film Festival Rotterdam, NYUFF, EMAF, National Review of Live Art, Triangle France, Kino der Kunst) and includes several award winning experimental narratives, video installation, a collaborative feature film, cinematic sketchbooks, moving image + live soundtrack performance work, etc.

A formative influence on his DIY approach comes from his experiences (from 1993–2006) as a core member and activist with the Exploding Cinema, a collective dedicated to originating alternative methods of exhibition for low-budget/artists' film and video and related performance.

Watch Online Free: Sunday, Oct 18 (24hrs)

Une manière d’écouter le monde [A Way of Listening to the World]

Pierre Ajavon | 2026 | France | 9 min | World Premiere

A Way of Listening to the World is a sound and visual journey built from field recordings and original music. Birds, voices, transportation and machines compose a fragmented listening experience where reality becomes a sensitive material. The film explores liminal spaces between presence and absence, environment and memory. 

Pierre Ajavon is a French visual artist, experimental filmmaker, composer and musician based in Paris. His work combines moving image, sound and experimental music, drawing influence from psychedelic culture, surrealism and psychoanalytic thought. After studying sociology and ethnomusicology, Pierre Ajavon turned to video art as a way to merge image and sound into immersive audiovisual experiences. His films and video works have been presented internationally at institutions and festivals including LACDA (USA), Fondazione Ragghianti (Italy) , Royal Scottish Academy (UK), CICA Museum (South Korea), Museum of Modern Arts (Brazil), The Wrong Biennale of Digital Arts, Experimenta (Portugal), Cairotronica (Egypt), AIDFF (Greece), Instants Vidéo (France) and MADATAC (Spain). Alongside his visual practice, Pierre Ajavon composes and performs music that blends experimental electronics, psychedelic textures and sonic exploration, developing a body of work where sound and image become inseparable. 

Toward a fundamental theory of physics

Victor Van Rossem | 2025 | Belgium | 13 min | Cdn Premiere

Shot on 16mm film using a handcrafted Time-Slice camera with 293 lenses—a modern reinterpretation of the original device built by Tim Macmillan in the early 1980s—Toward a fundamental theory of physics offers a unique, tactile exploration of time and light as the raw materials and fundamental paradoxes of cinema. 

The title is a reference to the “Theory of Everything,” the holy grail of physics—a single law that would unify the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics. A quest in which each step forward also feels like a step backward: to know more is to understand less, a conundrum that, for me, also characterizes artistic creation. As in physics, time and light are fundamental to film, and this experiment is a continuation of my research into these elements; a personal mission, perhaps, to unify scientific intent and poetic intuition. Where, in cinema, time and light usually work to reveal or transform the subject, here they become the subjects themselves: time as the sculptor, and light as the sculpted. This film was created during an artistic residency at Art Cinema OFFoff in Ghent, Belgium.

Victor Van Rossem is an artist from Ghent, Belgium, working across film, animation and writing. Embracing an experimental and eclectic approach, he is always searching for unexpected blends of media and genres. His work includes the short documentaries Neal D Retie for President! and Homeboy, the short story collection A Man Is Not Alone and Wereldbeïnvloederaar, a bundle of WhatsApp poetry. He also runs an experimental music label, bwaa. 

Sounds of a factory: WAV to PNG

Dina Yanni | 2026 | Austria | 7 min | Cdn Premiere

Sounds of a Factory: WAV to PNG translates factory recordings sampled from Youtube into visual noise patterns using scripting and databending techniques. Sound is segmented into micro-temporal units and algorithmically reinterpreted as grayscale pixel values. Rather than representing industrial labor, the work reenacts its operational logic: repetition, synchronization and normalization. The pulsating grain and the looping structure situate the viewer inside a rhythmic system in which perception itself becomes a site of power.

Dina Yanni is an Austrian–Egyptian video artist and political scientist. Her work is heavily influenced by popular culture, theories of postcolonialism, and a suspicion toward conventions and authority. Dina creates video work that uses existing footage, experimental editing, and data corruption to reveal, reevaluate, and reframe the power structures embedded in the original materials. Dina Yanni frequently combines artistic practice with scholarly analysis. Her work has been exhibited internationally at galleries, experimental film and video art festivals.

Spinoza’s Rainbow 1

Zachary Ridgway Barner | 2026 | USA | 4 min | World Premiere

A prelude introduces the algebraic calculation of a rainbow’s arc, reputed to be by Baruch Spinoza and dating back to 1687. A shadow observes itself, connecting two points. Through a series of single, double and triple exposures, the three colour records of 16mm film emulsion converge and diverge. Breath becomes a source of movement, and language transforms into frequencies, as if they could become light, through the recitation of three poems by Friedrich Nietzsche from 1887.

Zachary Ridgway Barner is an artist who works in moving images using hybrid narrative methods. His recent work looks at light, colour and the tension of what is heard to what is seen. He is interested in play and silence as an act of resistance, featuring the wind, chance encounters of the everyday and finding joy. Outside of his own practice, he can be found producing films which have premiered at FID Marseille (in competition), Berlinale and Sundance, among others. He received his Bachelor of Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is a candidate for a Master of Fine Arts in Program Film and Video at California Institute of the Arts.

Polychora

Abinadi Meza | 2026 | Mexico | 9 min | Cdn Premiere

A neuro-refuge of haptic cinema. Polychora moves between analog and digital, cellular and cosmic, organic membrane and fractal geometry. Chromatic masses drift through an aqueous prismatic field. A slowly-evolving electronic composition, biophilic and seemingly breathing, establishes volume. Image and sound suspend, fold and dissolve duration, rendering time palpable as somatic experience. The screen becomes a space for inhabitation and refuge.

Abinadi Meza is a Hñähñu artist, filmmaker, and composer. Trained in painting and architectural theory, Meza configures the moving image as a site of physical contact. His Elemental Cinema treats the 16mm substrate as a tactile, metabolic and synesthetic document. Meza employs hand-layered processes and electronic sound masses to produce chromatic depth and luminosity. He activates polyphonic signals, microsound and frequency interference in prismatic compositions where sound and moving image unfold as a resonant body. This investigation of material thresholds triggers a perceptual sublime; it becomes dimensional, molecular architecture.

Meza is a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome (FAAR). His media works, live performances and installations have been presented at Walker Art Center, MAXXI, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Lisbon Architecture Triennale, Sonorities and Blaffer Art Museum. His films have been featured in expanded cinema presentations by Public Art Fund and Film-Makers' Cooperative; screenings include Anthology Film Archives, Cineteca Nacional de México, FACT Liverpool, art + film + vienna, Crossroads, Kasseler Dokfest, MA/IN Festival × Centro Ricerche Musicali, Beijing International Short Film Festival, Vorspiel / CTM × Transmediale and Revolutions per Minute. He holds an MFA in Art from University of Minnesota and an M.Arch in Media and Theory from SCI-Arc, Los Angeles.

Vorfreude [Foresight]

glitschen | 2026 | Canada/Germany | 2 min | Cdn Premiere

Vorfreude (Foresight) is a short experimental film that drifts through the charged space before arrival. Woven from glitching images and analogue video and audio synthesis, it moves less like a journey toward something than like a figure wandering through their own anticipation, tracing and retracing the same trembling edges of feeling without ever quite touching what lies ahead.

Digital errors dissolve image and sound into stuttering detours fragments that loop back on themselves, signals that lose their way. These glitches map the inner geography of longing: a terrain without fixed paths, where the mind drifts between rehearsal and reverie, between what has been imagined and what remains out of reach. In counterpoint, analogue warmth seeps through slow, textured, bodily-like sensations of wandering through a familiar place made strange by expectation.

Vorfreude refuses arrival. Through its drifting rhythms and unresolved forms, the film holds viewers suspended in that luminous, restless state between anticipation and experience, where meaning meanders rather than declares itself, where beauty surfaces unexpectedly like something glimpsed from the corner of the eye and where the wandering itself becomes the destination.

glitschen is a Canadian artist based in Leipzig, whose boundary-pushing work navigates the intersection of technology and the organic. Educated at the Université de Montréal and the University of Huddersfield, she combines glitch and analogue video and audio synthesis to craft immersive and emotive works. Her art spans a wide range of media, from experimental film to contemporary dance scores, always experimenting with delicate sonic textures, synthesizers and acoustic instruments.

Null Adjustments

Andrew Northrop | 2026 | UK/USA | 17 min | Cdn Premiere

Null Adjustments follows the repair of the Buchla 100 at the Library of Congress, an early modular synthesizer built by Don Buchla for composer Morton Subotnick, who used it to create Silver Apples of the Moon. Shot on 16mm film and employing optical printing techniques, the film pays homage to the instrument’s emergence in the 1960s and showcases its continued playability today.

Andrew Northrop is a technician and film journalist based in London UK. He works as the Film and Media Technician for the Slade School of Fine Art. His writing and interviews have been published by BOMB Magazine, Hyperallergic, Sight & Sound, Little White Lies, MUBI Notebook, Millennium Film Journal and more.