Saturday | Oct 28 | 3pm
Screening @ Deluge
The Apocalyptic is the Mother of All Christian Theology
In-Person Screening: The Apocalyptic is the Mother of All Christian Theology
Student/Senior $6 (use code 25OFF at checkout)
Watch Online Free: Sunday, Oct 29 (24hrs)
Happy Doom
Billy Roisz | 2023 | Austria | 4 min | Cdn Premiere
Happy Doom is an audiovisual poem, an ode to colour intoxication and vertigo. The screen a vibrating membrane that simultaneously spits and swallows colours and noisy beats—a hypnotic deformed circumpolar psychedelic short trip.
Filmmaker, musician and performer Billy Roisz was born in Vienna, Austria. Since the late 1990s she has been intensely engaged with the media of video and sound. Her work focuses on experimenting with the connection between auditory and visual stimuli. She was co-organizer of the Reheat Festival (2007–15) and is co-organizing the sporadically held institut5haus exhibitions. Her films zounk!, darkroom and THE (co-directed with Dieter Kovačič) have screened in the Berlinale Shorts competition. In 2022, she was accepted as a member of the Vienna Secession.
The Apocalyptic is the Mother of All Christian Theology
Jim Finn | 2022 | USA | 64 min | Cdn Premiere
A psychedelic portrait of the founding theorist of Christianity. The story of Paul the Apostle’s life, ideology and influence is told by piecing together 20th Century 16mm and cassette propaganda, board games, animation, reenactments, Roman Empire doom metal and covers of Catholic liturgical music. The gentle Paul themes with flute, acoustic guitar and mellotron contrast with the Demonic Roman Empire themes of electric guitar, drums and synth. Performance artist Linda Mary Montano and Usama Alshaibi portray Paul on his journey.
The film tries to capture the disturbing reaction Paul and his letters had in the early days of Christianity. The use of live action, animation, found footage and original music was a way to recover his biography from the brains of 20th Century humans so that in some perhaps misguided Utopian impulse, we can build something new out of it for the future.
“Holy reconstructions of the sons of God, Jim Finn! Our favorite political atomizer gets holy in his new documentary crusade and decides to tell the story of Paul, the apostle who, the cheap internet would say, was “the most ardent propagandist of Christianism.” Finn, alongside artists Montano and Alshaibi, goes all scissorhands using 16mm institutional shorts, board game commercials, cassette tapes, trashy animations and, of course, period performances of not-so-doubtful quality—a rosary of archive footage that evolves in the map of pop culture, its praying and its saints. Psychedelic and ferocious, Finn extracts waste from the 20th century and, Doc Brown-style, uses it to make miracles based on science (that of film) that stare into the future.” – Juan Manuel Dominguez, BAFICI
Jim Finn’s movies have been called “Utopian comedies” and “trompe l’oeil films.” His Communist Trilogy is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. “Steeped in the obsolete language of revolutionary art,” The New York Times wrote that “Mr. Finn’s meticulous, deadpan mockumentaries often play like unearthed artifacts from an alternate universe.” His work has screened at international, avant-garde and underground film festivals like Rotterdam, Validivia, BAFICI, Edinburgh and the New York Film Festival as well as museums, universities, cinematheques and microcinemas. He was born in St. Louis to a family of Midwestern Catholic salespeople.
Saturday | Oct 28 | 6pm
Screening @ Deluge
Hello Dankness
In-Person Screening: Hello Dankness
Student/Senior $6 (use code 25OFF at checkout)
In-Person Screening Only
Soda Jerk | 2022 | Australia | 70 min | Vic Premiere
Comprised entirely of hundreds of film samples, Hello Dankness is a political fable that bears witness to the psychotropic spectacle of American politics from 2016 to 2021, and the mythologies and lore that took root around it. Taking form as a suburban stoner musical, the film follows a neighborhood through these years as consensus reality disintegrates into conspiracy and other contagions. What unfolds is a rogue retelling of history in which hotdogs debate the culture wars, trashcans preach QAnon, zombies rally for revolution and real events are refashioned as Broadway bangers from Cats, Les Miserables, Annie and The Phantom of the Opera. There are songs and dancing, moments of menace and melancholy, shitposting and deep sincerity. Begun in 2019 and labored on throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, Hello Dankness is a record of the time, written from the time.
The cast of characters include Tom Hanks, Annette Bening, Bruce Dern, Ice Cube, Wayne and Garth, Maya and Ana, Rue and Jules, Seth Rogan and Reyn Doi. American politicians play themselves, with Jesse Eisenberg in the role of Mark Zuckerberg and The Phantom of the Opera as Vladimir Putin.
A gleeful satire of our strange political times. – The Hollywood Reporter
Manic movie mash-up sees reality crash collide with fiction in ingeniously entertaining ways. – Time Out
Hilarious exploration of meme culture provides a poignant analysis of the modern political landscape. – Collider
A gonzo movie that perfectly ridicules America’s ridiculousness. As bizarre as it is brilliant. – The Daily Beast
Soda Jerk is an artist duo who make sample-based films with a rogue documentary impulse. They are fundamentally interested in the politics of images—how they circulate, whom they benefit and how they can be undone. Formed in Sydney in 2002, they’ve been in based in New York since 2012. They have exhibited extensively within the fields of art and experimental cinema, and have collaborated on projects with the cyberfeminist art collective VNS Matrix and electronic music group The Avalanches. Soda Jerk’s new feature Hello Dankness (2022) is a suburban stoner musical that bears witness to the psychotropic spectacle of American politics from 2016 to 2021. It premiered within the Panorama program of the 2023 Berlin International Film Festival. Hello Dankness follows their controversial political revenge fable TERROR NULLIUS (2018) which was disowned by its commissioning body, who called the film “UnAustralian.” The Guardian named the “dizzyingly ambitious satirical work” one of the best Australian movies of the decade.
Saturday | Oct 28 | 8pm
Screening @ Deluge
no more room in hell
In-Person Screening: no more room in hell
Student/Senior $6 (use code 25OFF at checkout)
Watch Online Free: Sunday, Oct 29 (24hrs)
Lotus-Eyed Girl
Rajee Samarasinghe | 2022 | USA/China/Sri Lanka | 6 min | W Cdn Premiere
Loosely based on the erotic poem “Caurapañcāśikā” by Bilhana, which was written in prison upon discovery of the poet’s clandestine affair with Princess Yaminipurnatilaka. The verses were written while awaiting judgment, not knowing if he was to be executed or exiled—his fate is unknown. Lotus-Eyed Girl ruminates on the curious and fractured intersections of death, desire and class. Fading family photographs (from an uncle’s funeral to my mother on her wedding day), pomegranate arils, pulsating floral mandalas and horror atmospherics culminate into an ecstatic collision of death and longing—echoing devastations of the past.
Rajee Samarasinghe was born and raised amidst the decades-long civil war in Sri Lanka. He later left for the United States where he is now based. He received his BFA from University of California San Diego and his MFA from California Institute of the Arts. Much of his work examines sociopolitical conditions in Sri Lanka through the scope of deconstructing ethnographic practices and the colonial gaze in contemporary media. His practice was born out of a desire to understand the circumstances around his childhood and often navigates the terrain of memory, migration and impermanence.
Samarasinghe is currently working on his debut feature film, YOUR TOUCH MAKES OTHERS INVISIBLE, which explores post-civil war Sri Lanka—the project has received support from the Sundance Institute's Documentary Film Program, Berlinale Talents’ Doc Station, Field of Vision and True/False Film Festival’s PRISM program. He was also named one of Filmmaker Magazine’s 25 New Faces of Independent Film in 2020 and was awarded a MacDowell Fellowship in 2023. He’s had solo shows at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA Modern Mondays), the Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival and Los Angeles Filmforum, among others.
Samarasinghe’s films have been exhibited at venues internationally including Tiger Short Competition at International Film Festival Rotterdam, New Directors/New Films by MoMA and Film at Lincoln Center, MoMA’s Doc Fortnight, BFI London Film Festival, FIDMarseille, Festival du nouveau cinéma, Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, Slamdance, SFFILM Festival, Melbourne International Film Festival, Vancouver International Film Festival, Guanajuato International Film Festival, BlackStar, CROSSROADS at SFMOMA, Media City, Prismatic Ground, etc. He’s received the Tíos Award for Best International Film at Ann Arbor Film Festival, Film House Award for Visionary Filmmaking at Athens International Film + Video Festival and an Honorable Mention at the Thomas Edison Film Festival.
They’re all dead
Marisa Benito | 2023 | Spain | 7 min | Cdn Premiere
In the post-photographic context of the digital age, we relate to images in a different way; they have other meanings, and they have been dematerialized. They have become elements without a body, ephemeral and superabundant. The transition from an analogue to a digital process has become a paradigm shift. Family photographs used to be a treasure, passed down from generation to generation, which we could look at and touch to evoke the memory of a moment, or of a loved one.
Marisa Benito has a Bachelor’s Degree in Fine Arts and a Master’s Research Degree in Art, Music and Aesthetic Education. She lives and works in Córdoba, where she teaches Audiovisual Media at the Mateo Inurria School of Art. Her research work focuses on staged or constructed photography from the perspective of female creation. She combines her professional activity with audiovisual creation and photography. The aesthetics of her work are generated through images shaped by sensory experience, the imaginary and the memory and photographic and cinematographic language.
Moss Grew
Ghazal Majidi | 2022 | Austria | 4 min | Cdn Premiere
In an abandoned house, nature has taken over. Strange creatures arise, destroying the trailing memories of the former hosts.
Ghazal Majidi is an experimental filmmaker and animator from Tehran, currently based in Vancouver. Her body of work ranges between 3D animated shorts, music videos and VR. Her works have premiered in film festivals and galleries in Iran, United States, Germany, Austria, Belgium, Japan, Spain, Slovakia and more including Vienna Shorts, Brussels International Film Festival, and Kuenstlerhaus Bethanien Berlin. With an academic background in Architecture, she has dived deep into the dynamics between space and story, a reciprocating relationship that drives most of her work. She focuses on creating new qualities of surrounding space to lure in outlandish tales, exploring familiar concepts like identity and its subcategories: memory, loss and attachment, as well as humans’ interaction with their environment. In her films, she creates atmospheric fantasies that spotlight the arbitrary, the mundane, and the ambiguous. Majidi is currently pursuing an MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts at Simon Fraser University.
Tlaloc (Lines Drawn in Water)
Abinadi Meza | 2023 | USA | 9 min | Cdn Premiere
Tlaloc (Lines Drawn in Water) is a hand-painted cameraless 16mm film exploring movement, light, materiality—ecstatic storms of transformation. Associated with mountains, Tlaloc is the god of rain, lightning, waters and growth in the Aztec pantheon. This film emphasizes the membrane of film itself—the skin, that opens into an immersive and “other” world.
Abinadi Meza is a Latinx-Indigenous sound artist and filmmaker based in Austin, Texas. His films have been presented at Anthology Film Archives, New York; Antimatter, Athens International Film & Video Festival, Atlanta Film Festival, Aurora Picture Show, Houston, Blaffer Art Museum, Houston, Blue Star Contemporary, San Antonio, Bogotá Experimental Film Festival, Festival de Cine Radical, La Paz, Cosmic Rays Film Festival, Chapel Hill, Crossroads Festival, San Francisco, Festival ECRÃ, Rio de Janeiro, Esto Es Para Esto Exhibidora de Cine, Monterrey, Filmmakers’ Cooperative, New York, Flatpack Festival, Birmingham, Houston Cinema Arts Festival, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Istanbul International Experimental Film Festival, Kassel Dokfest, Germany, Mientras Tanto Cine, Montevideo, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, Santa Barbara, non-syntax Festival, Taipei, ULTRAcinema, Tepoztlán, Weisman Art Museum, Minneapolis and Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus.
it follows it passes on
Erica Sheu | 2023 | Taiwan/USA | 5 min | W Cdn Premiere
Incense yielded a little light and led the way to hide from the bomb. Broken dishes time travel. Imaginations of a post-war island, Kinmen, from familial anecdotes. Tracing the roots of cross-generational sentiments behind the glare of glasses, the display of a self-made museum. Lights reveal and conceal the stories.
Erica Sheu makes short films, expanded cinema and installations with celluloid film. Her work is often about diary and handmade film, screen and projections, cross-generational memories, Taiwanese identity politics. Her experimental short films have been shown at NYFF Currents, TIFF Wavelengths, IFFR Bright Future, International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, (S8) Mostra de Cinema Periferico, EXiS, TIDF among other film festivals and venues. Sheu holds an MFA in Film/Video from CalArts. She works and lives in Los Angeles.
Ceci n’est pas un GIF [This is not a GIF]
Jules Ronfard | 2023 | Canada | 5 min | W Cdn Premiere
Ceci n’est pas un GIF is a film only made with GIFs. It’s a breach, a short object that questions our relationship to the real and digital world, to our physical presence on Earth.
Jules Ronfard is an actor and filmmaker from Montreal. His first short film En Attendant Lolo screened at the Regard Festival, Rendezvous du Cinéma Québécois, Rabat International Author Film Festival and several international festivals. For several years, he has accumulated experience by making clips, teasers, demos and video-poems.
no more room in hell
Rebecca Shapass | 2023 | USA | 23 min | World Premiere
Reanimating text culled from the archive of horror director George A. Romero (Night of the Living Dead), no more room in hell takes a reflexive, nonlinear approach to zombie apocalypse narratives to probe the fragility of human-built structures and systems. The film examines the implications of zombiehood in relation to industry, late techno-capitalism and apocalyptic realities. The cinematic work models itself after Romero’s cult classics which birthed the American cinematic zombie against the deindustrializing backdrop of Western Pennsylvania.
Rebecca Shapass is a filmmaker and artist interested in documentary form and archival practice. Her research-based work probes the unfixed nature of perception and its relationship to knowledge, intimacy and power. Her work has been exhibited and screened with institutions and festivals including Microscope Gallery (Brooklyn NY), Knockdown Center (Queens NY), Miller ICA (Pittsburgh PA), amongst others. She was a 2018–19 Smack Mellon Studio Artist and Van Lier Fellow (Brooklyn NY). She holds an MFA from Carnegie Mellon University and a BFA from New York University.