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Buses don’t stop here anymore

Penny McCann | 2024 | Canada | 7 min | W Cdn Premiere

Buses don't stop here anymore is a chronicle on Super 8 of the closure, abandonment and demolition of the Greyhound bus station in Ottawa. Once an important site for coming and going, an emotive epicentre, the camera observes the building’s erasure, dismantled by machines that writhe in the dust of demolition. Optical printing translates the act of observation into a requiem for a building, once so present and vital, now a ghost of the past. Filmed on Ektachrome Super 8 over a three-year period from the sudden closure of the Greyhound station in April 2020 to its demolition in 2022, Buses don’t stop here anymore speaks to the heartbreaking loss of long-distance bus travel in hundreds of small towns and cities across Canada.

Canadian media artist Penny McCann’s body of work spans 30 years and encompasses both narrative and experimental films and video. Since 2000, she has been engaged in creating a body of experimental films that journeys through an abstract and poetic terrain, forming a sustained meditation on landscape, place and time. According to Cecilia Araneda in her essay “Penny McCann: Within the Unsaid, A Response to Land Lines (of time and place) in no particular order:” “McCann intervenes with our sense of the familiar with her use of hand-crafted analogue filmmaking approaches…purposefully setting it back into a kind of suspension that we immediately associate with the dream state of processing memories.” Her work has been exhibited extensively at festivals and galleries nationally and internationally, including the Ann Arbor Film Michigan), Kurzfilm Festival Hamburg (Germany), Ottawa Art Gallery, Cinémathèque Québecoise (Montreal) and Canadian Film Institute (Ottawa).

Learn More About Penny McCann’s Work at Automat

Meziměstí  [In Between City]

Ilya Kreines | 2024 | Czech Republic/Israel | 9 min | Cdn Premiere

In Between City imitates a poetic wandering through the Central European city and its memory, through different time periods and places, blurring reality and fiction. The film is constructed from a collection of fragments, stories, images and impressions. In the flux of images shaping the non-existing city, the film accentuates the footprints of the vanished Communist and Jewish worlds it once contained. In parallel, the film focuses on technical exploration, as it is entirely made out of stamps, carved from erasers.

Ilya Kreines is a multimedia artist based between Jerusalem and Prague. His work focuses on topics of time, identity and mystification, through mediums of illustration, animation, cinema, video art, puppet theatre and their fusion.

Sente

Myriam Bessette | 2024 | Canada | 5 min | W Cdn Premiere

The animation collects field recordings and images captured in my environment and samples of my own voice. The animated sketches follow my journey through the Hochelaga-Maisonneuve neighbourhood. The film reveals a phonography and a drawing filled with artifacts, amplified noises and live analog processing, peering into the fringes of these fleeting moments.

Holding a bachelor’s degree from the School of Visual and Media Arts of Montreal (UQAM), Myriam Bessette joined the Montreal centre Perte de Signal in 2001. Her installations have been presented in Canada and in many European cities; Istanbul, Leipzig, Ghent, Marseille, Stuttgart, Trieste, Paris, Barcelona, Brussels. Additionally, her film works have been showcased in numerous festivals, including Sonar (Barcelona), the New Zealand International Film Festival (Auckland), European Media Art Festival (Osnabrück) and Elektra (Montreal). Her film Azur (2001) was acquired by the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec. Bessette lives and works in Montreal.

Wherever Street Piece

Panu Johannson | 2025 | Finland | 9 min | Cdn Premiere

Wherever Street Piece is a found footage film that describes impersonal and fragmented memories that cannot be directly linked to the life of one particular individual. Simultaneously the film documents the way these past realities—forgotten people in forgotten situations—blend together from the perspective of the present. Obviously not everything can be stored and passed on, but If we neglect the lessons of the past, are we also bound to repeat its mistakes?

Panu Johansson is a media artist and an experimental filmmaker from Finland. He works with moving image, photography and sound. His works have been exhibited in various festivals, exhibitions and microcinemas since 2000. Reoccurring themes in Johansson’s work are memories, landscape, the history of experimental film and cultural history. When working with moving image he prefers analogue film, though he is open to all materials. Johansson collects images and sounds eagerly and also likes to use “found footage” materials whenever possible. His works could be described with terms such as landscape film, diary film or personal film.

Learn More About Panu Johannson’s Work at Automat

They love me / They love me not / They love me

Lydia Hol | 2025 | Canada | 7 min | World Premiere

They love me / They love me not / They love me recalls a childhood ritual of seeking emotional certainty in an uncertain world. In an era of digital, emotional and urban noise, the film offers a slow, physical meditation on how we hold complexity. Performed by Juno award-winning musician and composer Ben Brown, the film helps us re-imagine the modern drum solo by using movement to communicate the energy of sound.

Filmed in Vancouver, BC’s Downtown eastside the film traces a journey from the streets to the studio. Sounds spill from the drum kit into the streets playing with our perception of noise, disorder and sacred space. The contrast between Vancouver’s raw street energy and the sterile stillness of the studio raises critical questions about how the broader world lives inside us—even in our most private rituals. A mostly improvised performance, this piece seeks to find solace in the unknown by asking not “who loves me?” but: “how do I live with the not knowing?”

Lydia Hol is a film director, musician and mother, who lives on the unceded territories of the Quw'utsun Nation, in British Columbia, Canada. As a musician she has released three critically acclaimed albums, toured Canada and Europe extensively and been an artist in residence in Austin TX, Lulea Sweden, Cardiff Wales and The Banff Centre for the Arts. As a filmmaker, she has directed three films that explore the intersection of film and music.

Panoramic Communion

Théo Zesiger | 2025 | France | 9 min | W Cdn Premiere

From the big wheel in the seaside district, a number of axes come forth. A succession of buildings compose the backdrop. The silhouettes and shadows wander and sway: strangely enough, they seem to stand alongside the same horizon.

Théo Zesiger is a filmmaker based in Marseille, France. His work, based on a mainly documentary approach, tends to somewhat fall within lyrical cinema. He explores intimacies within urban infrastructure and landscapes, in a poetic and anthropological combination. His recent screenings include WNDX Festival of Moving Image, Laterale Film Festival, Moviate Underground, Revolutions Per Minute, Stuttgarter Filmwinter and Festival Côté Court.

不好意思, 小姐 [Excuse Me, Miss!]

Cherlyn Hsing-Hsin Liu | 2023 | Taiwan/USA | 13 min | Cdn Premiere

Excuse Me, Miss! looks at Los Angeles from the perspective of a recent immigrant, observing things that are quietly changing the face of the city. The film’s title refers to the woman with a camera, whose filming is itself both an expression of presence and an intervention. The act of filming is entangled with the city landscape and interacts in the lives of those who pass by while recording. In 2023, my father passed away. I reread the works of Baudelaire and Benjamin and was once again attracted by the Flâneur’s fascination with the world and wandering life. The Arcades Project inspired me to look at a city carefully and slowly and think about how people from different backgrounds position themselves in the city, just as I am beginning to slowly understand Los Angeles, this complex city—joys and sorrows, beauty and ugliness, exclusion and intimacy, strange things and all kinds of people and landscapes.

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, Japan, Istanbul International Experimental Film Festival, Museum of Kyoto, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, M+ Museum in Hong Kong, among others. 

Learn More About Cherlyn Liu’s Work at Automat