Watch Online Free: Sunday, Oct 26 (24hrs)

Crystal Palace

Linda Izcali Scobie | 2024 | USA | 9 min | Cdn Premiere

Two films align as a languid meditation on motion, colour, pattern and joy. A collaboration between filmmaker Linda Izcali Scobie and musician John Davis for John’s 2024 LP release Landlines.

Linda Izcali Scobie is a filmmaker, programmer and projectionist living in San Francisco. She formerly served as the Assistant Director of Canyon Cinema, one of the oldest distributors of experimental and avant-garde film, and was on the Board of Directors for Artist Television Access. Her 16mm film work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at film festivals and venues such as Ann Arbor Film Festival, LA Film Forum, Antimatter, Centro de Cultura Digital in Mexico City and XCÈNTRIC – de Barcelona. In 2018, she was Artist in Residence at White Leaves Residency in New Mexico. She is currently a Senior Projectionist at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley.

What Wide Web?

Michiel van Bakel | 2023 | Netherlands | 5 min | Cdn Premiere

“A forest ecology is a delicate one. If the forest perishes, its fauna may go with it. The Atshean word for world is also the word for forest.” (Ursula K. Le Guin from The Word for World is Forest)

For some years Wood Wide Web is the magic phrase to describe the web of roots, fungi and bacteria helping to connect trees and plants to one another. In What Wide Web? Van Bakel depicts the surreal wasteland of Rotterdam Maasvlakte and its forest of pylons. After a bumpy ride we zoom in on the improbable beauty germinating underneath high voltage lines, a living part of our world hardly ever noticed. The plants that grow below the energy-web are shown as in a digital herbarium. We can ask ourselves: are industry and nature evolving more into co-existence?

Michiel van Bakel studied astronomy, photography and psychology for several years before he chose autonomous visual art at art school. Van Bakel expresses himself artistically in film and videos, sculpture and installations. His work focuses on the human-environment relationship and interdependence, resulting in a poetic, poignant reality. It conveys a fascination for the tension between humans and technology, and the perception of time in our disrupted ecosystems. “When I look around, I see a lot of technology that aims to constrain reality in predictability, by categorizing and automating. I want to use technology to evoke wonder and transcend reality and predictability. I like to visualize things that were previously unseen and in that sense enrich my experience of reality. That is for me the incentive to make use of experimental video and animation techniques. Devices such as cameras, scanners and image processing algorithms I see as an extension of my senses. With these tools I manipulate images that are like anchors in time for me, but also images from my urban backyard: my condition urbaine. In the same manner as a sculptor gives his material form through interventions in 3d space, I construct my videos in time. Recurring themes are examining human perception, experiencing time, disorientation and instability.”

The Last Thing I Think I Saw

Jason Kaminuma | 2025 | USA | 15 min | Cdn Premiere

A hallucinatory journey through the eyes of a patient experiencing a profound deterioration of their senses and perception as they confront their uncertainty, anxiety and the fragility of memory and identity.

Justin Kaminuma is a Japanese-American filmmaker whose work explores film as a meditative medium through diaristic and experimental techniques. He explores themes of childhood and coming of age with dream-like and nostalgic visuals.

monolithic tenderness

Kyle Joseph Petty | 2024 | USA | 7 min | Cdn Premiere

A tessellating flicker film that seeks to undo the cold, impersonal architecture of the city by dousing it in organic and domestic forms. Featuring a collaged soundtrack of spam phone calls, pulsing synth chords, bagpipe drones and a lullaby sung to my daughter while in-utero.

FLICKER WARNING: This film contains stroboscopic imagery

Kyle J. Petty is a visual artist working in film, video, photography and collage. His film work has screened internationally at Visions du Réel, Barents Ecology Film Festival, and Antimatter. Petty grew up in the Merrimack Valley of New Hampshire, earned a BA from Chester College of New England and an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts. He is a member of AgX Film Collective and teaches film production at Montserrat College of Art, Anna Maria College and Tufts University. Petty lives in Medford, Massachusetts.

Iris

Sheri Wills | 2023 | USA | 9 min | Cdn Premiere

Iris is a short experimental film that uses found 16mm footage, original tape loops and vintage recordings to explore attention, suspension and the slippage between language, music and aural phantoms—all focused outside of the boundaries of the recommended range. In early cinema the iris shot was used to gradually begin or end a scene and to focus audiences’ attention on something of importance in the shot; it mimics the opening and closing iris in the human eye.

Sheri Wills was an artist whose work was based in film, video performance and installation. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including one-person shows at Director’s Lounge in Berlin, Robert Beck Memorial Cinema in New York City and The International Experimental Cinema Exposition. Her films have been screened at venues such as the London Film Festival, Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Experiments in Cinema and Museum of Modern Art. Wills presented at venues including Roulette and Firehouse Space in Brooklyn and the Czech Center in New York City. Her film-based installations have been exhibited in galleries and museums including Islip Art Museum; Hobusepea Gallery in Tallinn, Estonia and At Home Gallery in Šamorín, Slovakia. She was a professor in the department of Film/Animation/Video at Rhode Island School of Design.

Custom Trailer Series: Austin Powers

Kelly Egan | 2025 | Canada | 5 min | World Premiere

Exploring écriture feminine and women’s structural narratives, the Custom Trailer Series reimagines Hollywood films through the structure of a traditional quilt pattern. Here, Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me has been recut to construct a starburst quilt, and then scanned as a film. The work exists both as a material object (the quilt) and the visual representation (the film), drawing attention to the materiality of the filmstrip and the patriarchal biases still present in commercial cinema.

Dr. Kelly Egan is an Associate Professor of Cultural Studies and a Canadian filmmaker, educator and scholar. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Mass Communication from Carleton University (2001), Master of Arts in Communication and Culture at York/Ryerson University (2003), Master of Fine Arts in Film/Video at Bard College (2006), a Certificate in Film Preservation from the Selznick School of Film Preservation at George Eastman House (2012) and a PhD in Communication and Culture from the York/Ryerson Joint Graduate Programme in Communication and Culture (2013). Egan’s film work explores issues of materiality, intermediality and media obsolescence. Her films have been screened at major festivals across Canada and internationally, including Toronto International Film Festival, Images Festival, New York International Film Festival, Rotterdam International Film Festival and EXiS Experimental Film and Video Festival. Her film-based installations have been exhibited at York Quays Gallery/Harbourfront Centre in Toronto, L’espace virtuel in Chicoutimi, PQ and Govett-Brewster Art Gallery/Len Lye Centre in New Zealand.

Tulsa

Scott Stark | 2024 | USA | 14 min | Cdn Premiere

Stereo photos of 1950s-era cocktail parties are transformed into an intense visual playland.

Scott Stark has made over 80 films and videos since the early 1980s, and has created numerous moving image installations, live performances and photo-collages. He received an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and served on the Board of Directors of the San Francisco Cinematheque from 1984–1991. His work has shown nationally and internationally in venues as diverse as New York’s Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco Cinematheque, Film Festival Rotterdam, Tokyo Image Forum and many others. His 16mm film Angel Beach was invited into the 2002 Whitney Biennial and in 2007 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship. His 2013 film The Realist showed at numerous worldwide film festivals and was on several year-end “best” lists. His work has garnered numerous awards. He is the webmaster for Flicker, the web resource for experimental film and video, and in 2012 Scott co-founded an avant garde film screening series in Austin called Experimental Response Cinema. He lives in San Francisco, California.