Saturday | Oct 24 | 3pm
Screening @ Deluge
Air, Fire, Water, Earth: The Films of Jaimz Asmundson
Watch Online Free: Sunday, Oct 25 (24hrs)
Karen Asmundson, Jaimz’ widow and collaborator, will be in attendance to introduce the program and talk about his and their work.
Jaimz Asmundson (1981–2024), the filmmaker, was unexpected. Named “Winnipeg’s enfant terrible of transgressive cinema” by Victoria’s legendary Antimatter Festival for his commitment to works that were campy and subversive, the artist and filmmaker also built a practice centred on mediating personal relationships. The personal was always present for Asmundson. Even in his earlier works there is the deep and continued participation and collaboration of his family and close friends, and also his pets. This presence not only hints at the artist he would evolve into, but also how he would emerge as one of Winnipeg’s most important cultural workers in the media arts, for community was always central to him.
The son of artists, Asmundson was particularly influenced by his father C. Graham Asmundson’s trajectory. Graham described his working process to his son from early childhood as being a “conduit for an unseen magical force,” and this left a deep impression on the child Asmundson was at the time and the artist he would eventually become as an adult. In this way, transgressive art was handed down to Asmundson like a family business – but this served only as a starting point.
In 2006, several years after he emerged as an artist at age 18 with the iconic 1999 film Attack of the 50 Foot Chihuahuas From Outer Space!, Asmundson’s filmmaking practice would be transformed by the WNDX One Take Super-8 Event. The event, which restricts the filmmaking process in a dogme-like manner to impose Super 8 home movie aesthetics and which does not permit post-production editing, emerged in the mid- to late-aughts as the most influential production incubators of its kind in Winnipeg. Asmundson would develop a special affinity for it. Works created for the One Take, often co-directed by his wife Karen Asmundson or starring her as a main performer, include Drawing Genesis (2006), SLEEP (2008), Goths! On the Bus! (2010) and Citizens Against Basswood (2012). Goths! On the Bus! would additionally feature a musical collaboration between Jaimz and Karen that would hint at their professional music duo project, Ghost Twin, to come in future years.
The two major works that Asmundson worked towards throughout his career were The Magus (2011), a portrait of his artist father C. Graham Asmundson that emerged from the process of making Drawing Genesis, and Echoes (2015), an act of memory processing in response to the death of Asmundson’s mother, poet Carol Barton, from cancer a few years prior.
Much like the Qabalistic correspondences Asmundson was known to evoke in his creation process, the film works of Jaimz Asmundson ultimately cast a connection between the earthly world and the divine, and what giveth and what taketh away.
Curated by Cecilia Araneda for WNDX Festival of Moving Image.
Attack of the 50 Foot Chihuahuas from Outer Space!
Jaimz Asmundson | 1999 | Canada | 8 min
A group of bored, giant Chihuahuas land on Earth and lead a demented war against a young goth and his friends by waiting around every corner and pissing on them every chance they get.
Carpet Cleaners
Jaimz Asmundson | 2002 | Canada | 26 min
Amerika, Zed and Kyle are good friends until Trasha enters the frame, cutting Kyle off from his friends. Amerika and Zed aim to free Kyle by enlisting the aid of the Sappho Carpet Cleaners for some wet work, but the plan goes awry when the tables are turned. With a special appearance by Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan.
SLEEP
Jaimz Asmundson | 2008 | Canada | 1 min
Asmundson’s first attempt at a One Take film in 2008 was torn to shreds by the camera he’d borrowed. Left with no alternative, Asmundson made Sleep while he slept, using the open exposure setting on his new Bauer camera, with no light except for what spilled in through the window. Eight hours of sleep is compressed into 20 seconds. But this is only the beginning.
Goths! On the Bus!
Karen Asmundson, Jaimz Asmundson | 2010 | Canada | 3 min
A couple of über-goths ride public transit to go to the mall to buy more lipstick. Shot in sequence and in one take for the 2009 WNDX One Take Super 8 Event.
Citizens Against Basswood
Karen Asmundson, Jaimz Asmundson | 2011 | Canada | 3 min
Found audio of concerned citizen(s) rallying to prevent the nuisance of new trees scheduled to be planted on their block in the 1980s. Produced for the 2011 WNDX One Take Super 8 Event.
Kanashibara
Jaimz Asmundson | 2007 | Canada | 11 min
Following the death of his girlfriend in a car accident, a man attempts to maintain his grip on sanity. Plagued with interruptions from terrifying bouts of sleep paralysis, his sense of the real and the illusory world begins to blur when he is visited nightly by hallucinations in the form of a Succubus.
Plastic Heart
Jaimz Asmundson | 2017 | Canada | 5 min
A peek into the underground after-hours goths-only gym, Sweat+Despair, that is occupied by netherworld fitness instructors and haunted by ghosts and ghouls. A music video for Plastic Heart, by Ghost Twin.
ephemeros
Jaimz Asmundson | 2009 | Canada | 3 min
The positive phototaxis of ephemeral forces in nature.
Drawing Genesis
Jaimz Asmundson | 2006 | Canada | 3 min
Drawing Genesis is a saturated visual compendium that traces C. Graham Asmundson’s performative gestures and visual residue. With the use of time lapse, still frames, lens obstruction, occult symbolism, subliminal imagery and blatant queer references, the film presents a ritual of artistic inspiration that invokes man’s primal forces. Created for the 2006 WNDX One Take Super 8 Event.
The Magus
Jaimz Asmundson | 2011 | Canada | 12 min
The Magus explores the root of artistic creation. The film documents the work of C. Graham Asmundson, the filmmaker’s father, ritualistically birthing, destroying and resurrecting the work, manifesting the Asmundsons’ shared personal exploration of occult ceremonies and experiences. The father/son team explore mind-altered states and invoke unnatural resurrections; where unforeseen demons and other spiritual forces are often released.
Echoes
Jaimz Asmundson | 2015 | Canada | 6 min
Structured around the recollection of a premonitory dream, fragmented memories from the period leading up to the death of the filmmaker’s mother, Carol Barton, were projected on to natural textures and surfaces, then re-photographed, composited and processed until the memories became abstracted representations of the evolution, degradation and disintegration of memory and the physical self.
Saturday | Oct 24 | 6pm
Screening @ Deluge
Hugs & Kisses
In-Person Screening: Hugs & Kisses
Student/Older Adult $6 (use code 25OFF at checkout)
Watch Online Free: Sunday, Oct 25 (24hrs)
Beach Day
Damian Gong | 2025 | USA | 2 min | Cdn Premiere
Fish, bodybuilders and soccer games re-materialize in a boy’s mind. Inspired by childhood videos and transitioning, Beach Day is a collage of past and present, digital and analog, imagined and real. Digitized camcorder video, rotoscoped animations and narrated anecdotes merge with ambient noises to create an unravelling of time.
Damian Gong is an artist and filmmaker based in NYC. He works with animation, painting, printmaking, drawing, installation, sculpture and film. Using material experiments, his work interprets mainstream American culture through a trans/queer lens. Damian also likes weightlifting, fishing and ugly dogs.
A New Kind of Daytime
Jennet Thomas | 2026 | UK | 10 min | World Premiere
A New Kind of Daytime is an absurd sci-fi that imagines a future where “care” is monetized by budget AI. A satirical monologue is riddled with a fever-dream of images and events that could be the memories of a dementing mind, or the glitches of a device-controlled brain.
A woman (played by the filmmaker) speaks to camera from a comfy chair, secured in a care home, criminal facility or some kind of “experience farm” where value is extracted from her most vivid memories. She speaks defiantly in riddles and loops about the rules of her confinement: “There are gestures I am not supposed to make… There are directions in which I am not supposed to look… But I was tired, I met its eye… I may have opened an attachment."
A younger woman is trying to visit her, but they seem divided by layers of fake virtual space—and she is having problems of her own. A piece of automated weather fell into her room, which with a bit of hacking might help serve as a communication device between her and the older woman—but it soon gets out of hand. The film is also a reflection on the experience of watching your parent's mind slip away into dementia, whilst facing the fact of your own aging. By placing herself in the role of the generation above, the film maker deploys gallows humour to construct a tribute to the defiant spirit required to navigate that unknown future territory.
Jennet Thomas makes films, performances and installations exploring connections between fantasy, ideology and everyday life. Often darkly comic and absurd, they collide genres and explore collective constructions of meaning.
Her work emerged from the anarchistic, experimental culture of London’s film/live art scene in the 1990s, when she was co-founder of the Exploding Cinema Collective. Thomas’s works have shown widely in different forms—large-scale sculptural installations that physically surround the film, sometimes with continuous live performance inside these installations and also at many international film festivals.
She’s had two major solo shows at Matt’s Gallery London, and over 12 solo video installation shows in venues across the world. Her films have been featured in spotlight programmes at venues including Light Industry New York, Kurzfilmfestival Koln, The Pleasure Dome, Toronto and her films have screened at festival such as European Media Arts Festival, IFF Rotterdam and museums such as Tate Britain and MOMA New York. She is a Reader in Time Based Media and Performance at University of the Arts, London.
Age Perfect
Dayna McLeod | 2025 | Canada | 2 min | Vic Premiere
A video essay that playfully uses performance-based methods of re-enactment to attempt to enter the frame and material conditions of anti-aging cream commercials and other beauty ads to critique their construction while showcasing their artifice.
Dayna McLeod is a middle-aging queer performance-based media artist. Her work often uses humour and capitalizes on exploiting the body’s social and material conditions. Her video essays have been published in [in] Transition, ASAP/Review, Teknokultura and Intermédialités and have been named in the British Film Institute Sight & Sound Best of Video Essays lists for 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024. Her video and performance works have been presented at Impakt Festival in Utrecht Netherlands, Mardi Gras Festival in Darlinghurst Australia, MIX Brazil Festival of Sexual Diversity in São Paulo, Modern Art Museum in Warsaw Poland, Le Centre d’art contemporain in Paris, Tang Teaching Museum in Saratoga Springs, PHI Centre, OFFTA and Rendez-vous Québec Cinéma in Montreal, Summerworks Theatre Festival in Toronto and Performatorium, Queer City Cinema’s performance festival in Regina.
The Fruit Machine: A Space Opera
Lorri Millan, Shawna Dempsey | 2025 | Canada | 6 min | Vic Premiere
When a queer little space alien crashes to earth and looks for survival tips, she finds what she needs on television, a ready-made guide to the ins and outs of 20th century conformity. This tale is set against the true history of the Fruit Machine, a test for aberrant sexuality developed by the Canadian government in the 1960s.
In the 20th century, the Canadian government was so intent on “weeding out” homosexuals, it had an entire department devoted to surveillance, threats and interrogation of its employees. In the 1960s, a more efficient series of tests were proposed, to measure physical and verbal responses to an absurd array of images, words and questions. Developed over years with federal funding, the so-called Fruit Machine was never put into practice because it did not work. Nonetheless, the idea that the Canadian government could and should know one’s secret desires contributed to a climate of anxiety with respect to what is and isn’t “normal.” The Fruit Machine was part of a punishing and pervasive system of oppression that included monolithic portrayal of gender norms and heterosexuality in television and film, news, advertisements and entertainment. The ideals of post-war consumer society insisted on conformity and its enforcement. No one was more vulnerable to this messaging than children.
Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan create smart and funny feminist performances, films, videos, artist’s books and public art projects. They have performed and exhibited throughout Canada, Japan, Europe, Australia and the U.S. These collaborators since 1989 are infamous for pieces such as We're Talking Vulva, A Day in the Life of a Bull-Dyke and Lesbian National Parks and Services.
Injured?
Eislow Johnson | 2025 | USA | 13 min | W Cdn Premiere
Need help? Crashouts, manifestation influencers and injury lawyers collide in this breakneck ride through the Midwest. 50 years after attorney ads were first legalized in the U.S., their ubiquitous self-portraits (allegedly) invoke a churn-and-burn economy of volume, velocity, fears and veneers.
Eislow Johnson is a filmmaker, sound designer and educator from Skokie, Illinois. His practice engages cinema as a sound art and as a way of navigating and responding to the world’s vibration and instability. His films have screened at Prismatic Ground, L’Alternativa, EXiS, UnionDocs, Labocine, Cinemateca Nacional del Ecuador and Athens International Film + Video Festival. He is a co-founder of Great Lakes Listening Series and a 2025–26 Emory Arts Fellow in Film and Media.
Theme Song
McLean Fahnestock | 2026 | USA | 4 min | Cdn Premiere
Singers perform in their homes to faceless internet crowds. They sing about their desire for control.
McLean Fahnestock is a Nashville-based interdisciplinary artist who works with desire in the manufactured landscape and its violent consequences. The grandchild of an explorer, Fahnestock questions how desire shapes our relationship with the land, manipulates our perception and judgement and manifests in conflict, violence and ownership. Her practice is primarily in video and other forms of new and digital media, animation, installation and sculpture, most often engaging in appropriation and collage strategies integrating forms of digital capture, presentation and creation with embodied layering and sculptural containers for media.
Fahnestock received a MFA from California State University Long Beach. Her work has been exhibited and screened across the United States and Internationally at institutions such as Aurora Picture Show and Menil Collection, Frist Art Museum, Black Mountain College Re{Happening}, Technisches Museum Wien, California Science Museum, British Library, MOCA Hiroshima and Off the Screen at Ann Arbor Film Festival. Her work has been supported by grants from Puffin Foundation, Hoff Foundation, Durfee Foundation, South Arts and Current Art Fund, a regional regranting program of the Warhol Foundation. She has been an artist in residence at Cerritos College, Vanderbilt University, The School of Making Thinking, Stove Works, Mineral House and The Lock-Up.
Hugs & Kisses
Marc Richter | 2025 | Germany | 11 min | Cdn Premiere
A film about men. And hugs. And kisses. A new film by Marc Richter aka Neue Deutsche Kunst, who’s been working tirelessly on arcane new works since winning the MuVi-Award at renowned Shortfilmfestival Oberhausen, turning so-called artificial intelligence on its head. Richter’s video works are highly influenced by the writings of feminist writer Angela Carter (specifically The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman) hallucinating a world of human snails and snail-like humans, human mushrooms and mushrooms with human skin, hermaphrodites and men without genitals…chimeric protagonists performing useless, pointless, Sisyphean tasks.
Under the Neue Deutsche Kunst alias Marc Richter (also known for his musical project Black to Comm) is testing the boundaries of AI software by overloading it with surreal and confusing tasks and information (all within a visual framework of his own making). The AI is trying to make sense of these almost poetic texts by hallucinating lysergic artworks and films. Richter’s visual works are as much influenced by German folklore and fairytales as well as actionist performance, psychedelic art and the writings of Angela Carter and JG Ballard.
Saturday | Oct 24 | 8pm
Screening @ Deluge
Augmented
In-Person Screening: Augmented
Student/Older Adult $6 (use code 25OFF at checkout)
Watch Online Free: Sunday, Oct 25 (24hrs)
softer, softest
Olivia Norquay | 2025 | Canada | 5 min | BC Premiere
A skin flick.
Olivia Norquay is a film programmer, curator and emerging experimental filmmaker that lives and works on Treaty 1 Territory in Winnipeg. Her practice is informed by cultural theory, sex, punk, gender and transgressive films and literature.
Marked
Wrik Mead | 2026 | Canada | 3 min | Cdn Premiere
Marked is an experimental film that merges Super 8 and 16mm formats to examine the presence of queer intimacy. At its centre are two shirtless men, locked in an embrace, dancing—a quiet yet radical act. Overlaid with hand-inked 16mm film, their bodies become both seen and obscured, highlighted and erased. Through this layered process, Marked reflects on how queer love is shaped, celebrated and scarred by the society that surrounds it.
Wrik Mead has accumulated a unique body of more than 50 animated miniature narratives: fantasies, parables, dreams and documentaries. They are a mix of painstaking animation, fairy-tale allegory and queer-identity.
In 2013, he launched his first UK solo show, an installation titled Draw the Line, at PayneShurvell Gallery in London. His works have screened at national and international festivals like Toronto International Film Festival, Berlinale, San Francisco International Film Festival and Sydney International Film Festival. He has won numerous awards including his most recent films, Outcognito and Broken Relationship, being honoured at Ann Arbor Film Festival and Black Maria Film Festival. He currently teaches in the new Experimental Animation program at OCAD where he has recently been appointed co-chair.
My Structuralist Film
Angelo Madsen | 2026 | USA | 6 min | Cdn Premiere
How shall I cater best to your desire for me to be visible? Set up as a confessional-cum-guided meditation, My Structuralist Film uses performance artist Tehching Hsieh’s One Year Performance (“Time Clock Piece”) as a framework to illustrate the filmmaker’s (presumable) insides. How thoroughly should a trans body want or need to be visible? On what terms is the filmmaker obligated to narrativize, perform or eve fabricate visibility for the sake of an audience? Considering the limits and limitations of disclosure, this project positions the act of looking not as an offering or an exchange, but as an unyielding neoliberal, capitalist craving to consume.
Angelo Madsen (previously known as Madsen Minax or Angelo Madsen Minax 2005–24) is a multi-disciplinary artist and filmmaker. His projects weave personal and collective histories, cultures and kinships, with interests in self-mythologies, embodiment and the politics of desire. Madsen’s works have shown at Berlinale, Sundance, Toronto International Film Festival, New York Film Festival, Leslie-Lohman Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, REDCAT, Museum of Moving Image, Anthology Film Archives, BFI and dozens of documentary, LGBT and experimental film festivals around the world. His works are available via Criterion, Mubi and New York Times. His early experimental work is held by Video Data Bank.
explant / implant
Josh Weissbach | 2025 | USA | 3 min | W Cdn Premiere
A lifetime of surgeries continues with an upgrade in battery life and a downgrade in scar tissue when the filmmaker has his original pacemaker replaced after 16 years.
Josh Weissbach is an experimental filmmaker. His films have been shown worldwide in such venues as Ann Arbor Film Festival, Light Field, European Media Art Festival, 25 FPS Festival, Courtisane Festival, First Look at Museum of the Moving Image, Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival, Festival dei Popoli and Festival des Cinémas Différents et Expérimentaux de Paris. He has won jury prizes at Montreal Underground, Videoex, ICDOCS, Onion City, Ithaca Experimental, Infinito Super 8, Denver Underground and Art of Brooklyn Film Festival. He is the recipient of a 2021 Artistic Excellence Award from Connecticut Office of the Arts, a 2020 Moving Image Fund Early Development Grant from LEF Foundation, a 2018 LightPress Grant from Interbay Cinema Society, a 2015 LEF Fellowship from Robert Flaherty Film Seminar, a 2013 Mary L. Nohl Fellowship for Emerging Artists from Greater Milwaukee Foundation and a 2008 Cary Grant Film Award from Princess Grace Foundation.
Augmented
Raymond (Ray) Rea | 2025 | USA | 8 min | Cdn Premiere
Augmented is an experimental nonfiction short, shot completely on 16mm, that analyzes commonalities between medical augmentation and transgender alignment. At a time when we are under attack, we realize that we’re frightening because we’re the future.
Raymond Rea is a Transmale filmmaker and writer. His film work has screened widely including AgX Film Collective, Boston; Engauge, Seattle; RPM Experimental FF, Boston; Film-Maker’s Coop, NYC; Analogica, Italy; Cine Salon, Ireland; Stockholm Trans FF, Sweden; BFI, London; Union Docs, Brooklyn; Artists Television Access, San Francisco; Flex Fest; The Nightingale, Chicago; Mimesis, Boulder; San Francisco Transgender FF, San Francisco; San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival (Frameline); Wicked Queer, Boston; Translations, Seattle; Lost & Found, Amsterdam; Outfest, Los Angeles; Inside Out, Toronto; Mix Mexico; Mix NYC; New Fest, NYC; Out on Screen, Vancouver; Inside Out, Toronto; Reeling, Chicago; Hamburg LGBT Film Festival; Melbourne GLBT Film Festival; as well as other national and international venues. His interactive work screened at Plains Art Museum as part of the ND Human Rights Arts Festival. Ray’s writing has been produced at EXIT Stage Left, EXIT Mainstage, BUILD and Theatre Rhino in San Francisco and at Theatre B in Fargo, North Dakota.
The Ship of Theseus
Colin Mason | 2025 | USA | 4 min | World Premiere
Medical imagery, retrieved from the filmmaker’s body when he had a bone marrow transplant in 2021, becomes the foundation for disembodied questions of selfhood. In this experimental documentary, 2D and 3D animations create an abstract series of landscapes out of scans originally taken for medical treatment.
Colin Mason is a Chicago-based film programmer and experimental filmmaker, whose work explores bodies, queerness, media and memory.
tempus fugit
Rebecca Shapass | 2025 | USA | 30 min | Cdn Premiere
tempus fugit moves through spaces bound by absence and transformation: a suburban home left untouched after a relative’s death, a cryonics facility where bodies are frozen for possible revival and a composting bin alive with worms. In these spaces rot and preservation are contemplated as the film wrestles with the desire to hold onto what has already passed.
This film was shot in my grandmother’s home in Staten Island NY and at a cryonics facility in the North American Southwest. Interviews were conducted with two cryonicists on site. An additional interview was conducted with Jungian psychoanalyst/ alchemist/author Stanton Marlon in Pittsburgh PA. The sole archival footage in the work is that of the Medium Meurig Morris performing a séance (1932); the footage was sourced from British Movietone.
Rebecca Shapass is a filmmaker and artist investigating documentary form and archival practice through the creation of film and video, photo, installation and text. Shapass’ work combines techniques of optical and aural abstraction with documentary sensibilities to propel audiences into a space of questioning not only what they see and hear—but how and why. Shapass is compelled by the uncapturable—what escapes both image and language—and how these absences haunt memory and archive
Her work has been exhibited and screened with institutions and festivals including Smack Mellon, Miller ICA, Microscope Gallery, Knockdown Center, The Anderson, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Mimesis Documentary Festival, Motel/X Lisbon International Horror Festival, amongst others. She was a 2025 artist-in-residence at Mattress Factory Museum in Pittsburgh and previously held residencies at Crosstown Arts in Memphis and Smack Mellon in Brooklyn, where she was also a NY Community Trust Van Lier Fellow. In 2023 she was granted a Creative Development Award from the Heinz Endowment. Shapass holds an MFA from Carnegie Mellon University and BFA in Film and Television and Art History from New York University.