Saturday | Oct 26 | 6pm
Screening @ Deluge
No Horses on Mars
Watch Online Free: Sunday, Oct 27 (24hrs)
ex vivo
Eeva Siivonen | 2024 | Canada | 6 min | Cdn Premiere
ex vivo maps an experiential space that is both permeated with vitality and haunted by personal and ecological loss. It is an elegy for the deep yet precarious connections that emerge between human and nonhuman bodies and ecosystems; connections that are constantly both found and severed.
Eeva Siivonen’s experimental moving image practice engages with strategies of documentary, essay and found footage. She employs these strategies to construct affective and immersive moving image installations and single-channel works that speak to the experience of dislocation and fractured relationship to body, language and place. They describe subjective experience in ways that resist separation between self and other, interior and exterior, human and nonhuman and living and nonliving.
She exhibits her work internationally at film festivals and gallery exhibitions. Most recently, her single-channel work has been screened at San Francisco Cinematheque’s Crossroads festival, DOBRA International Festival of Experimental Cinema, Transient Visions Festival of Moving Image, Barcelona International Short Film and Video Festival, Bideodromo International Experimental Film Festival and Black Maria Film Festival, among others. She is originally from Helsinki, Finland and is currently residing in London, Ontario.
Pirouette
Ann Oren | 2024 | Germany/Spain | 13 min | NA Premiere
A dreamlike journey, a disintegration into a fluid human-animal-plant-machine consciousness, Pirouette follows a sound artist who records horse sounds using her own body, while a cellist on the street invades her imaginary. It is the psychedelic conclusion of the horse-foley trilogy: Passage (2020) – Piaffe (2022) – Pirouette (2024).
Ann Oren is an award-winning Berlin-based visual artist and filmmaker. By dissolving distinctions between plant, animal and human, she asks what it is to be human in an ecosystem immersed in digital culture. Questions about intimacy and identity keep emerging through various audio-visual approaches, while exploring gender, fictosexuality, animality, interspecies and other hybrid conditions. Employing a visceral language, she leads the spectator with their own body towards critical thinking. Her work’s institutional presentations include The Moscow Biennial for Young Art, Hammer Museum, Tel-Aviv Museum, Apexart, Lentos Kunstmuseum and Kindl – Zentrum für zeitgenössische Kunst.
With The Tide, with the tide
Anna Kipervaser | 2022 | USA | 3 min | Cdn Premiere
I know, you’re a seasonal beast
Like the starfish that drift in with the tide
With the tide
So until your blood runs
To meet the next full moon
Your madness fits in nicely with my own
With my own
Your lunacy fits neatly with my own
My very own
– from Sea Song by Robert Wyatt
Anna Kipervaser is a Ukrainian-born artist whose practice engages with a range of topics including human and animal bodies, ethnicity, religion, colonialism and environmental conservation. Her engagement with these topics is informed by a commitment to formal experimentation, DIY and alternative processes, spanning disciplines including experimental and documentary moving image works in both 16mm film and digital video. Her work has screened at festivals internationally, including at Slamdance, Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, Crossroads, Edinburgh International, San Francisco International, Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival, Light Field, Antimatter, Fracto, Imagine Science Film Festival, Big Sky Documentary Film Festival, Milwaukee Underground, Chicago Underground, Athens International Film and Video Festival, Indie Grits, Muestra Internacional Documental de Bogota, among others. Anna's work also screens in classrooms, galleries, microcinemas, basements and schoolhouses! Her films are distributed by CFMDC, Alchemiya and Canyon Cinema. She is also a painter, printmaker, educator, curator of exhibitions, programmer of screenings.
The Cavalry
Alina Orlov | 2024 | Canada/Israel | 17 min | Vic Premiere
The Cavalry is a semi-documentary that follows horses in a rural setting, the West Bank and an Israeli police unit, alongside manipulated archival footage. It explores horses’ sensitivity and their relationship with humans, showing what these interactions say about society. Central to the film is the story of a young horse named 7, undergoing harsh conditioning in an Israeli cavalry training program. Officers subject him to loud noises, violent abrasions, water dousing and uncomfortable conditions, highlighting the desensitization process for controlling public protests.
Alina Orlov is an artist and filmmaker. She earned her MFA in Film, Video, New Media and Animation from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, following a distinguished BFA with honours from Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem and a student exchange program at the Slade School of Fine Art in London. Her work has been exhibited internationally in venues such as Galerie Historischer Keller in Berlin, Sullivan Galleries in Chicago and YARAT Contemporary Art Space in Baku. Her debut short film The Cavalry premiered in the Pardi di Domani section of the 77th Locarno Film Festival. She currently resides in Canada
Desire Path
Sofia Theodore-Pierce | 2023 | Ireland/USA | 3 min | W Cdn Premiere
Snatches from personal archives compiled during the month of forced slowness following a surgery. The dog died. Her oranges ripened. The horse unbridled. Cantering around Circle A. Reflections on leaving Milwaukee.
Sofia Theodore-Pierce is an artist, filmmaker and writer. Their poetic non-fiction films seek to render the cyclical, digressive, often vulnerable nature of human conversation, either explicitly––audibly or visibly––or implicitly––through structural choices. Their work has been exhibited at festivals and venues such as Antimatter Media Art, Alchemy Moving Image Festival, Prismatic Ground, The Wexner Center for the Arts and FRACTO Berlin. In addition to MIAD, Sofia has taught courses at UW–Milwaukee and Bard College.
No Horses on Mars
Bea de Visser | 2024 | Netherlands | 15 min | Cdn Premiere
We experience a trailer ride on the highway and wake up from anesthesia in a veterinary clinic. No Horses on Mars is practically a road film, whose POVs from the horse is the most effective element of the film. The horse appears as the galloping mind that resides in all domesticated horses. The human being is introduced as a screen viewer who follows the horse, wants to measure, records and know her as an object. Ultimately, from the human perspective in the film, there seems to be a glimmer of recognition for the individuality of the horse.
Bea de Visser (Netherlands) studied visual art in Breda and Rotterdam and attended the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. She is a film producer and makes video installations and short films. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at MoMA New York and the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.
Saturday | Oct 26 | 8pm
Screening @ Deluge
De Occulta Imagine
In-Person Screening: De Occulta Imagine
Student/Older Adult $6 (use code 25OFF at checkout)
Watch Online Free: Sunday, Oct 27 (24hrs)
Monolith
Teri Carson | 2023 | Mexico/USA | 14 min | Cdn Premiere
Part essay film, part video poem, Monolith braids found footage, documentary, experimental, 3D animation and narrative filmmaking devices to explore notions of collectivity, dissent, indigenous knowledge and time as a series of folds, splits, ruptures, loops, clusters, drifts, ascents, descents, vortexes, pulses, rhythms, linkages, aberrations, burials and unearthings. This shape-shifting film addresses ongoing legacies of nationalist archives, archeology and coloniality.
Teresita Carson is an artist and educator working across disciplines, including moving image, new media, sound, sculpture, photography, print media, fibre and installation. Taking an irreverent feminist approach to world and counter-archive building, she explores the abstract intersection between the historical, the speculative, indigenous cosmogonies and magical peripheries. Through weaving and its Indigenous histories, she activates the genre of science-fiction as a feminist strategy to mine for aspirational modalities and clues towards a decolonial path. Her experimental films have been shown at festivals and curated film exhibitions at Museum of Contemporary Art of San Diego. Recent venues presenting Carson’s work include Mana Contemporary, Sullivan Galleries, Moving Image at ACRE, Spudnik Press Collective, Czong Institute for Contemporary Art (CICA Museum), Ugly Gallery, Hyde Park Art Center, Gallery 400 and Cleve Carney Museum of Art. She is director of the project space INTERSECT, which exhibits and supports artists making time-based work. She holds a Bachelors in Fine Arts from the School of the Art institute of Chicago and an MFA from the University of Illinois Chicago under the advisership of Deborah Stratman. She resides in Chicago, Illinois in the land of the Three Fires Confederacy, Potawatomi, Odawa and Ojibwe Nations.
Direction of the Road
Janelle VanderKelen | 2023 | USA | 8 min | Cdn Premiere
As a tree muses on their role in the Order of Things, this being (which humans normally think of as immobile) reveals the speed, agility and finesse integral to their experience of the world. Adapted from a short story written by Ursula Le Guin, this decidedly inhuman filmic narrative uses the overlapping cyan and scarlet of anaglyph stereoscopic 3D imaging to speculate how a tree (which responds more acutely to light waves in the red and blue portions of the spectrum) might perceive the world visually. Though 3D stereoscopy is used in this film, it is intended to be viewed without 3D glasses.
Janelle VanderKelen is an artist, curator and educator currently based in Knoxville, TN. Her films and intermedia installations imagine alternative acts of relation between imperfect bodies (human, vegetal, geological or otherwise) and make visible the agency of plants through experimental time-based media processes. VanderKelen’s work has been exhibited at institutions including Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, Anthology Film Archives in New York and Bow Arts in London, England. Her films have screened at Ann Arbor Film Festival, True/False, Athens International Film + Video Festival, Revelation Perth, IC DOCS, San Diego Underground Film Festival and Antimatter [Media Art].
Radicle City: Snapshots of Bangalore
Arjuna Keshvani-Ham | 2024 | Canada/India | 10 min | NA Premiere
Radicle City is a cinematic essay which imagines a future in which Bangalore’s gardens no longer exist. Narrated as a poetic address by a voice who has grown up in a city without trees, the film’s hybrid documentary and fictional narrative recovers and reinterprets footage of an unknown walker’s journey along a park that marks an old line of colonial segregation in the city. This is an old border with new lines: today the city is India’s “silicon valley,” an IT hub at the heart of a network of global capitalism, an incubator for the apparatuses of Modi’s digital technocracy and one of India’s most unequal and divided cities. Moving restlessly back and forth between past and possible future, the film is at once an investigation into the city’s complex colonial entanglements and their afterlives, and an elegy to the city’s gardens, fragile spaces of resistance in a metropolis which threatens their destruction.
Arjuna Keshvani-Ham is a British-Canadian filmmaker, artist and writer. She received her BA in English and German at the University of Oxford (2021) and MA in Contemporary Art Practice at the Royal College of Art. Her multi-part documentary/artistic project Radicle City premiered at Artcore Gallery, Derby, UK, as part of the exhibition The Silence of Growing Things. In 2023, Arjuna’s film I cannot wash away the blue premiered at the Tate Modern. Over the past three years she has worked on a number of short documentary films in the framework of transnational, collaborative educational projects. In 2022, Arjuna co-created "Contested Legacies Portugal,” a digital archive and funded documentary film series that aims to excavate and document the legacy of the early Atlantic slave trade in Portugal. She is currently producing a documentary On the Banks of Democracy, which scopes the potential for traditional community participation systems in Albania to make green development systems just. Arjuna also works as a freelance video producer at Times Radio.
long ago, far away
Mark Street | 2023 | USA | 3 min | Cdn Premiere
Images culled from a lot of glass slides bought at a roadside antique shop, animated using an antiquated magnifier/projector and a laser flashlight.
Mark Street has been making films, videos and installations for 30 years. His work has moved from tactile, abstract explorations of 16mm film to essays on the urban experience to improvised feature length narratives. He has shown at places like the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the National Gallery in Washington DC as well as venues such as the Point Reyes California Oyster Farm. He graduated from Bard College (BA 1986) and San Francisco Art Institute (MFA 1992). He has shown work in the New York Museum of Modern Art Cineprobe series (1991, 1994), at Anthology Film Archives (1993, 2006, 2009), Millennium (1990,1996) and San Francisco Cinematheque (1986, 1992, 2009). His work has appeared at the Tribeca (five times), Sundance, Rotterdam, New York, London, San Francisco, New York Underground, Sarajevo, Viennale, Ourense (Spain), Mill Valley, South by Southwest and other film festivals. His projects has been supported by a number of grants from foundations, including the Jerome Foundation, the Film Arts Foundation, New York State Council on the Arts, the Maryland State Arts Council and NY Experimental TV Center. In 2006 he was asked to participate in the Hallwalls Artists Residency Program in Buffalo NY. In 2018 he was a Visiting Artist at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Some of his film work has been performed live (at Tonic, Galapagos and Le Petit Versaille in NYC) with accompanying musicians, including Marc Ribot, Zeena Parkins, Bradford Reed, Marco Testoni and Jane Scarpantoni. In 2007 at Hallwalls he presented a multi media show entitled Inside and Out: Infected Districts and Memory Lanes with Buffalo performance and music groups Real Dream Cabaret and Open Music Ensemble. He has curated and judged several film and art exhibitions including Ventana al Sur: An Evening of Argentine Experimental Film (with Lynne Sachs) at Anthology Film Archives and Pacific Film Archive in 2009 as well as Video Landscapes (2005) and Real Abstractions (2007) both at Fordham University’s Center Art Gallery. His 2016 essay “In Defense of Street Photography in an Iphone Age” appeared in Filmmaker Magazine, online. His self-published book of photographs 100 Sides of a Sphere is on sale at Printed Matter in NYC. Two of his personal essays “Film is Dead: Long Live Film” and “Festival of Flight” appeared in Film Arts Magazine in 2008. An essay about film funding “Who’s Asking?” appeared in Millennium Film Journal #51 entitled Experimental Documentary. Cinema Argentina – An Argentine excursion: film frames and talk therapy (with Lynne Sachs and Pablo Marin) appeared in the Spring 2009 issue of Gonzo Circus. He has led community workshops a variety of venues (Echo Park Film Center in LA, Cucalorus Film Festival in Wilmington NC, Fondacion d’Arte Contemporaneo in Montevideo Uruguay, Utopia Art Space in Murcia Spain, Cinema Tonali in Tijuana, Mexico) on a variety of topics, including “The Devil is in the Details: Urban Street Videography.” He is Professor of Visual Arts at Fordham University where he teaches film/video production and other courses that engage contemporary artistic practice.
De Occulta Imagine
Stefano Testa | 2024 | Italy | 16 min | Cdn Premiere
A short essay on alchemical transmutation of moving images in which the Spagyric Art is exercised with the intention of extracting Mercurial Spirit from the metals of the Audiovisual Archive of the Labor and Democratic Movement.
Stefano P. Testa lives in Bergamo (Italy) and works as a director, camera operator, video editor, colourist and post production technician. He collaborates with Lab 80 film and Bergamo Film Meeting in documentary films production. His award winning films have screened extensively internationally.