Saturday | Oct 21 | 3pm
Screening @ Deluge
back home
In-Person Screening: back home
Student/Senior $6 (use code 25OFF at checkout)
In-Person Screening Only
Nisha Platzer | 2022 | Canada/Cuba | 90 min | Vic Premiere
back home follows filmmaker Nisha Platzer’s pursuit to get to know her older brother, Josh, 20 years after he took his own life. As she connects with the friends who knew him best as a teen, a complex portrait emerges. Through intimate recollections re-imagined on Super 8 and 16mm film, and lyrical images hand-processed with plants, seaweed, soil and ashes, back home floats between memory and present time in a fragmented meditation on identity, grief and loss: illuminating the transformative power of healing in community.
Evokes the spirits and memories that linger. – POV Magazine
Captures a level of intimacy rarely seen on screen. – The Link
Pushes the documentary form; a poetic, sensory portrait of what it feels like to lose a sibling. – Stir
Back home bridges together the twinned worlds of art and emotion, creating a shared space for grief, healing and true catharsis. – The Tyee
Nisha Platzer (she/her) is a queer artist and filmmaker from Vancouver, Canada. Her films meld sounds and imagery that you can dream and drown in. Her short film Vaivén (2020) won the best film award at aluCine Latin Film & Media Arts Festival and competed at festivals worldwide including Raindance, Festival Nouveau Cinéma, FIDBA, and Ji.hlava IDFF. Nisha studied Communications at Concordia University and Documentary Film at the Escuela Internacional de Cine y Televisión (EICTV) in Cuba. Her work has been supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, the BC Arts Council and the National Film Board of Canada. She teaches handmade film workshops and is a member of Iris Film Collective. An alumnus of IDFAcademy, the VIFF mentorship program and the Hot Docs Doc Accelerator Lab, her work can be found in music videos, narrative and experimental films. back home is her first feature documentary supported by Telefilm Talent to Watch and presented at the Docs-in-Progress Canadian Showcase at Cannes Film Festival 2022.
Saturday | Oct 21 | 6pm
Screening @ Deluge
This Line Connects the Void
Watch Online Free: Sunday, Oct 22 (24hrs)
As close as your voice can call
Derek B Jenkins | 2023 | Canada | 14 min | W Cdn Premiere
A film about language, about the way trauma inflects grief and about learning to speak with the dead.
Derek Jenkins is a motion picture photographer born in Monroe, Louisiana in 1980. His practice is handmade, personal and documentary, with an interest in labour, ecology and technology—specifically the reciprocal relationships between tools, materials and ways of knowing. He received a BA (2003) and an MA (2008) in English from the University of Arkansas, and an MFA in Documentary Media from Toronto Metropolitan University (2021). His films, including Contents (2018), The Shouting Flower (2019), Livestock (2019), Grounders (2020) and HERBARIA × PELICULA: Field Portfolio (2021) have been exhibited at festivals, museums and galleries, including DocLisboa, Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival, McMaster Museum of Art, ARKIPEL – Jakarta International Documentary and Experimental Film Festival, Antimatter, the8fest, FRACTO Experimental Film Encounter, Photophobia, Media City Film Festival and Experiments in Cinema, among many others. He is Executive Director of Hamilton Artists Inc. and previously worked as a technician at Niagara Custom Lab. He lives in Hamilton, Ontario.
Sisters
Marisa Hoicka | 2022 | Canada | 2 min | Vic Premiere
Sisters run wild when an incident unveils how their paths will diverge. This ethereal film, created using archival footage, composes a fresh narrative that eerily subverts past expectations.
Whether through video, on a canvas, a performance or an installation, Marisa Hoicka creates narrative paintings that come to life. She integrates paintings, compelling tactile elements, performance art, interactive video and other electronic media. Hoicka’s film Sisters, had its world premiere at International Film Festival Rotterdam in 2023. Her film, This is Not a Test, was shown on all Air Canada flights as part of Images Festival’s “Stitches in Time,” as well as in Berlin’s Galerie Kurt Im Hirsch, San Francisco’s MoMA, Oakville Galleries and across Canada. She has exhibited at the 7a*11d International Performance Art Festival, Power Plant, Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Department of Canadian Heritage, Toronto Dance Theatre, Eastern Edge Gallery, Dancemakers and Art Gallery of Ontario for Nuit Blanche. She has participated in residencies with Images Festival, Sirius Arts Centre in Cork, Ireland and the Doris McCarthy Artist Residency. Hoika holds a Master of Digital Media from Ryerson University and a BFA in Studio Arts from Concordia University. Her video work is distributed by Vtape.
Exquisite Corpse Trilogy
Seokyoung Yang | 2023 | Korea/USA | 17 min | Cdn Premiere
Through three unsuccessful attempts and trials, a filmmaker seeks to reconcile with the death of her father.
Seokyoung Yang (she/they) is a curator, poet and filmmaker dedicated to artistic experimentation. Born and raised in South Korea, she investigates the correlation between anomaly of language, diasporic bodies and internal loss through moving images and texts. She received a BFA in film and video from California Institute of the Arts. She currently resides in Los Angeles, California.
Jesa
Jonathan V Lee | 2022 | USA | 8 min | W Cdn Premiere
Made after the passing of the filmmaker’s grandfather, Jesa is a film dealing with themes of intergenerational trauma and its inherited effects on intimacy and family by reconstructing traditional Korean funerary rites. Exploring the effects of colonization and post-war memory on the intimate scale of family, Jesa uses song, stories and recollections of the past to wrestle with the questions of how we exist together after trauma.
Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Jonathan Lee is a Korean-American video artist and filmmaker working with themes of family, diaspora and ecology. His films have screened at the Beijing International Short Film Festival, This Human World International Human Rights Film Festival and the Winnipeg Underground Film Festival.
Retrospectiva de un Hogar (erase una vez...)
[Retrospection of a Home (once upon a time…)]
Sebastian Marcano-Perez | 2022 | USA | 9 min | Cdn Premiere
A personal essay film dives into the collective memory of a family and the home in Venezuela they had to leave behind.
Sebastian Marcano-Perez is an experimental filmmaker, born in Caracas, Venezuela and raised in Miami, Florida. From surreal and avant-garde narratives to experimental documentaries, he is constantly evolving in style and subject matter. His most recent work, Retrospectiva de un Hogar, sought to explore the consequences of immigration in the collective memory of a family through an anthropological exercise. Thematically, it evolved into a personal examination of his home country and the roots he had forgotten.
This Line Connects the Void
Tram Quynh Nghiem | 2023 | Canada | 16 min | W Cdn Premiere
Filmed in the artist’s family apartment on the edge of Parkdale in the city of Toronto, this work explores the poetics of grief and precarity for the family around the time of death and dying regarding the artist’s sister. With non-linear storytelling and fragmented images, the work moves between speculative fiction, documentary and experimental film. Referencing Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee (1982) and Anne Carson’s poem On Walking Backwards (1995), it considers the space and metaphor of a void and the desire that moves between the dead and living.
Tram Nghiem is a queer Southeast Asian cultural programmer and artist working with stills and moving images. Trained in digital video, their art practice uses process-based inquiries, digital/analog methods and explores the relationship between people and their environments. They have produced work for the Syros International Film Festival and are currently working on an experimental video work funded by the Canada Council for the Arts.
Saturday | Oct 21 | 8pm
Screening @ Deluge
Vision of Paradise
In-Person Performance: Vision of Paradise
Student/Senior $6 (use code 25OFF at checkout)
Watch Online Free: Sunday, Oct 22 (24hrs)
Island
Jack Cronin | 2023 | USA | 3 min | Cdn Premiere
A filmic postcard from Isle Royale National Park.
Jack Cronin is an artist, filmmaker and educator born in Royal Oak, Michigan. Working in both analog and digital formats, his practice often combines documentary and experimental techniques to explore urban and natural landscapes, cycles of the seasons and poetic interpretations of place. He received a BS in Film from Eastern Michigan University (1997) and an MFA in Film from University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (2001). His films have been exhibited at festivals, museums and galleries. He has taught film and media arts at Wayne State University, the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and College for Creative Studies. Jack is currently tenured faculty at Oakland Community College and lives in Canton, Michigan.
Heat Spells
Sarah Ballard | 2023 | USA | 9 min | World Premiere
The Fountain of Youth mythology has forever changed the landscape of St. Augustine, Florida. Looking closely at Florida’s commodified landscape, Heat Spells visits contemporary locations that claim to be the site of the Fountain of Youth in an attempt to capture the everlasting consequences of the mythical spring and its entanglement with the origins of colonialism in the United States.
Sarah Ballard is a filmmaker and educator whose work concerns hauntological subjects—afterimages of colonialism, ghosts of the working class and political residues of hysteria. Her work has screened at festivals such as Crossroads, Antimatter, San Diego Underground Film Festival, Engauge Experimental Film Festival, Onion City Experimental Film Festival and Montreal Independent Film Festival. She is a recipient of the 2023 Princess Grace Award in Film and received her MFA in Cinematic Arts from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Peck School of the Arts.
Favourite Umbellifers
Emily Pelstring | 2023 | Canada | 4 min | W Cdn Premiere
This animation was created as a series of experiments with hand-processed 16mm film, collected and collaged to the sound: photograms of hair, confetti and sand, stop-motion sand animation, bleaching, toning and paint on film.
Emily Pelstring obtained her BFA from Rhode Island School of Design in Film/Animation/Video, and her MFA from Concordia University. Her work focuses on collaborations with musicians, such as performance visuals and music videos, which have premiered on Pitchfork, THE FADER, Rookie Mag and MuchMusic. She also creates multimedia projects with her collaborator Jessica Mensch under the moniker Inflatable Deities. She currently teaches Media Production in the Communications Studies Department at Concordia University.
The Faded Landscape
Mingyong Cheng | 2022 | USA | 6 min | Cdn Premiere
The Faded Landscape is an animation co-created by AI and us. This animation is inspired by the story of a famous Chinese landscape painting Thousands Li of Rivers and Mountains, in which the artist adopted the lasting mineral pigment that created a striking blue and green landscape painting that remained unfaded for thousands of years. By viewing the historical transition from nature landscape to modern “concrete jungle” and the continuing impact of climate change, we collaborated with AI to create a journey based on a fusion of our concerns and AI memory.
Mingyong Cheng (Beijing, China) currently based in California, is a computational and interdisciplinary artist who explores the intersection between new media art, science and culture. At the University of California, San Diego, she is pursuing a PhD in Art Practice with a Specialization in Interdisciplinary Environmental Research at the Visual Arts Department and Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Her research and creations explore the fusion of new media technology and traditional Chinese art, as well as environmental issues. Mingyong earned her MFA degree in Experimental and Documentary Arts from Duke University, where she expanded her artistic approach from documentary film to a more experimental approach incorporating new media technology including AI-generated art, AR experiences, 3D virtual experiences and interactive installations.
Oculto [Hidden]
Sebastian Wiedemann | 2023 | Colombia/Peru | 9 min | NA Premiere
The celestial bodies enunciate something in the midst of their mystery. The moon turns red, the planet cries, the fall is deeper than we could imagine. Hidden, something lurks. In the middle, a requiem or perhaps an elegy. The uncertain as a path that leads us to a catastrophe that we do not know is past, present or future. But which is undoubtedly a deep memory of a dark secret. The broken whispers of a wounded jungle.
Sebastian Wiedemann is a Colombian filmmaker-researcher and philosopher-practitioner of cinematic modes of experience. His works investigate liminal intersections animated through experimental cinema and philosophy, aware of a possibility for thought-cinema as living poetic ecology and a surface for the affirmation of a cosmopolitics of image. His award-winning films including Obatala Film and Deep Blue have screened in venues around the world and at retrospectives in Colombia, Brazil, Mexico, Spain and Ireland. In 2015 Wiedemann’s Los (De)pendientes was included in Artforum’s list of the best films of the year and in 2017 his Abismo was included in the film series Ism Ism Ism: Experimental Cinema in Latin America at Los Angeles Filmforum.
Picture a Forest
Dave Rodriguez | 2022 | USA | 4 min | Cdn Premiere
An anti-landscape performing its own impossible, inevitable annihilation. The north Florida woodlands fractured by strobe light, offering glimpses of its vitality and fragility. Over time, these flickering slices of the natural world become more corrupted and illegible, decaying into garbled data streams. As the forest fails to preserve itself, it demands that we re-calibrate our vision.
Dave Rodriguez is an audiovisual archivist, filmmaker and curator originally from Miami FL. His single-channel video, 16mm film and live expanded cinema work has been screened/performed in festivals and galleries across North America and Europe including Ann Arbor Film Festival, Antimatter, FLEX Film/Video Festival, Cosmic Rays Film Festival, Mono No Aware X, The International Noise Conference, Performing Media Festival, Miami Music Club, Le 102 and 621 Gallery. He currently works as a librarian at Florida State University.
Vision of Paradise
Leonardo Pirondi | 2022 | Brazil | 16 min | Cdn Premiere
The great voyages to the “New World” were seen as expanding the frontiers of the visible and displacing those of the invisible, therefore, maps from that time render the real and imaginary. The film follows a voyage of the Brazilian military in search of an imaginary island with the same name as their country. The mythical Hy-Brazil was known to exist to the west of Ireland and above the Fortunate Islands. Vision of Paradise is an examination of the capacity of the human imagination and computer simulations to construct environments. Amidst the fine threshold of the real, simulated and imagined, the film analyzes contemporary ideas of virtual reality and their ambition to expand the frontiers of the physical world into a “New World.”
Leonardo Pirondi is a Brazilian filmmaker based in Los Angeles, São Paulo and Porto. 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, BFI London, Melbourne, Edinburgh and others. He holds a Film/Video degree from CalArts and is a Sundance Ignite Fellow.