Sunday | Oct 19 | 6pm
Screening @ Deluge
Refrigerator Hum
Complicated histories, parent-child connections, journeys of generation loss.
Watch Online Free: Monday, Oct 20 (24hrs)
Dreams of My Father
Jonathan Seungjoon Lee | 2024 | India/Canada | 14 min | W Cdn Premiere
Entering from the intimate and often complicated relationships between fathers and sons, Dreams of My Father explores memories and visions from God, gods and ghosts and their reverberations in family lives.
Jonathan Seungjoon Lee is a Korean-American video artist and filmmaker working with themes of family, diaspora and ecology.
The light that covers the wounds
Pol Merchan | 2024 | Korea/Argentina/USA | 15 min | Cdn Premiere
After many years of silence and distance, a filmmaker travels to his place of origin with the intention of reuniting with his mother. As the encounter unfolds, the lights and shadows of their relationship are revealed, hinting at a moment of emotional openness.
Pol Merchan is an artist, filmmaker and curator for the Xposed Queer Film Festival Berlin. He holds a degree in Fine Arts from the University of Barcelona and a master’s degree from the Art in Context program at Universität der Künste Berlin. He was nominated for the Lichter Art Award with his film Pirate Boys and the Golden Key at the Kassel Documentary Film and Video Festival with The Garden of the Fauns. Merchan’s work has been exhibited internationally in art institutions and at numerous festivals such as MoMA, Museo Reina Sofía Madrid, Contemporary Culture Centre of Barcelona, Anthology Film Archives New York, Los Angeles Film Forum, Institute of Contemporary Arts London, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen and Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival.
浮萍 [fú píng]
Tian Liu | 2025 | China/USA | 10 min | World Premiere
fú píng (“duckweed”) is an essay film that follows a woman as she drifts through memories of home, family and womanhood. Through quiet imagery and poetic voiceover, the film reflects on generational trauma, cultural displacement and the unspoken tension between mothers and daughters—floating between time, language and place.
Tian Liu is a multimedia artist and filmmaker working between Los Angeles and Shanghai. Her practice spans video, installation, performance and photography, exploring memory, gender, intergenerational trauma and cultural displacement. Rooted in personal and familial histories, her works investigate silence, fragility and identity through unconventional narrative forms.
Learn More About Tian Lius’s Work at Automat
refrigerator hum
Jade Wong | 2025 | USA | 15 min | Cdn Premiere
An artist collects and processes images of their mother’s restaurant kitchen and their grandmother’s daily life. Memory and embodied knowledge is reanimated through various image formats: 35mm portraits on oscillating lenticular prints, laser jet prints of 35mm film transferred onto 16mm loops and photographic prints on polystyrene. An intergenerational critique unfolds.
Jade Wong is an artist, filmmaker, restaurant worker and cook born in Seattle WA and based in Los Angeles CA. They experiment with non-fiction, analog film, video, performance, craft, food and sound. Their work has been showcased nationally and internationally at Engauge Experimental Film Festival, Mimesis Documentary Festival, TRANSlations Film Festival, Burnt Video Art and Experimental Film Festival, Floating Projects Collective and Roots & Culture Contemporary Art Center. They are currently pursuing their MFA in New Genres at UCLA.
Losing Your Mother
Arjuna Keshvani-Ham | 2025 | India/Canada | 14 min | NA Premiere
Losing Your Mother traces a walk the filmmaker took through Mumbai, India in 2023—the same city in which her Nanabapa (grandfather) studied shortly before emigrating from India to the UK a decade after Indian partition in 1947. Gradually, the filmmaker’s images of the city become testament to the gulf between her Nanbapa’s life and her own, as her attempts to align his memories with the spaces she encounters are repeatedly frustrated. Blending narrative, archival footage and objects with home videos shot by the filmmaker’s mother, the film becomes an attempt to negotiate the gaps and fractures which emerge out of displacement, diaspora and generational trauma.
Arjuna Keshvani-Ham is a British-Canadian-Indian filmmaker and journalist. She received her BA in English and German at the University of Oxford and MA in Contemporary Art Practice at the Royal College of Art. Using methods drawn from both documentary and fiction practices, her films use intimate essayistic aesthetics and/or obsessive painterly detail to address the materiality of trauma, histories of displacement and unresolved legacies of empire. Her work to date has focussed colonial legacies in India, Portugal and the UK. Arjuna’s films and installations have been exhibited internationally at festivals and exhibitions. She is currently an Artistic Research Fellow at the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington DC, and a recipient of the Richard Beeston Fellowship (2025). Arjuna is based in New Delhi, India where she works as a foreign correspondent.
Sunday | Oct 19 | 8pm
Screening @ Deluge
The Believers
In-between spaces of dream and trance ground moving images in ancestral relationships and traditional ways of knowing.
In-Person Screening: The Believers
Student/Older Adult $6 (use code 25OFF at checkout)
Watch Online Free: Monday, Oct 20 (24hrs)
The Believers
Evan Newman | 2024 | Thailand/USA | 14 min | Cdn Premiere
A tiger stalks his dreams. A woman seeks belonging. A man finds courage under the magical spell of his tattoos. Each year in Thailand, believers of an ancient ritual offering supernatural powers gather for a sacred day—where unseen forces stir and spiritual possession erupts. The Believers conjures an arresting, surreal window into the transformative power of individual and collective faith.
Multidisciplinary filmmaker Newman explores the crossroads of personal narrative and collective experience through a sensorial and humanistic lens. His Emmy-winning editorial and creative practice spans video works for music artists David Bowie and Kings of Leon, and independent documentaries across five continents. He recently edited the feature film Game Change Game, about athlete activism during a US social injustice reckoning, and crafted Amplified, an innovative immersive show on rock history for Rolling Stone. The Believers, his directorial debut, investigates the embodied dimensions of faith and ritual to shape individual and communal realities, and is the first in an ongoing cross-cultural project. His work has exhibited internationally, including Austin, Odense, Aesthetica, Montclair, SF DocFest, Mammoth Lakes and Tribeca Film Festivals.
Ang Kalayo sa Gintung-an [A Flame in Our Midst]
Elvert Bañares | 2023 | Philippines | 10 min | Cdn Premiere
In the shadowy kingdom of Dumalángto ruled by Aetudhaman, the one-eyed king, everyone is forced to believe that they are blind. While the king feeds on people’s blood to gain more power, Elhanan, a sighted and discerning slave, gets enraged by the evil occurrences. Seeing the spread of darkness, famine and injustice, he awaits the right moment when he can get hold of the tattooed winged horse to attack the one-eyed king and fuel the flames of the masses to rebel against the dominion.
Elvert Bañares is a very independent filmmaker and multidisciplinary artist acting as his own cinematographer, production designer and editor. He started making underground experimental films and video art in 1993 and has moved on to narrative shorts and documentaries starting in 2008. He is an Urian Award Winner (2023), one of the most coveted film awards in the Philippines given by the Manunuri—the Philippines’ longest-running Film Critics’ Group; three time Cultural Center of the Philippines Award Winner for Independent Film; and winner of 13 international awards during the past three years including Kota Kinabalu International Film Festival; Encuentro Cinéfagos – Festival De Cinearte En La Frontera; Wasteland Film Festival; La Paz International Film Festival, Copenhagen Web Fest, Ojo Móvil Fest and Brunei Film Blitz.
Learn More About Elvert Bañares’ Work at Automat
Fusion
Richard Reeves | 2024 | Canada | 3 min | W Cdn Premiere
Investigating interplay between sound and picture as visual music. An experimental animation experience produced by drawing both sound and picture onto 35mm film. A film without words. No camera or musical instrument was used.
Richard is a kinetic film scratcher, visual music maker, animated traveller of time and space, light sensitive, spinner of zoetropes, looper of loops and collector of projection bulbs for total enlightenment. He is best known for creating animations by drawing both sound and picture directly onto film and has produced award-winning films that have screened around the world.
Learn More About Richard Reeves’ Work at Automat
La Partida de las Imágenes [The Departing Images]
Ana Edwards | 2023 | Chile | 11 min | Cdn Premiere
Between ethnography and reverie, The Departing Images enters the in-between spaces of dreams to explore how human and non-human social networks emerge through dreaming in a Mapuche family in the south of Chile.
Ana Edwards studied visual arts in Chile. In 2019 she completed an MA in Visual Anthropology in the UK. Combining ethnographic processes with the evocative and sensory powers of the audiovisual, her work explores diverse ecologies and ways of inhabiting the world, systems of relationships between beings and their environment. She is interested in the notions of nature and culture as they transform and shape each other in symbolic and material ways. Edwards is currently in residence at Le Fresnoy Studio National des Arts Contemporains in France.
Maílmmittkus [At the Shadow of the World]
Arttu Nieminen, Hans Pieski | 2025 | Finland | 8 min | Cdn Premiere
A surreal journey into the complex relationship between indigenous peoples and the unstoppable force of technological progress. The film depicts various stages of technological development and their impact on indigenous populations.
Hans Pieski, a Sámi filmmaker from Utsjoki, crafts captivating and unique visual narratives with a surreal twist that dives in the intersection of indigenous culture and the Arctic environment.
Arttu Nieminen, a Finnish media Aartist from Rovaniemi, creates works that are described as mysterious, flowing and meditative. His pieces take on hallucinatory shapes, offering dreamy odes to the mystical aspects of nature and inviting viewers to explore the forest with fresh eyes.
ദിനോസറിന്റെ മുട്ട [Dinosaur‘s Egg]
Sruthil Mathew | 2024 | India | 18 min | Cdn Premiere
This hybrid personal essay ventures into the depths of the country which the filmmaker’s grandparents left 80 years ago in one of the colonialist-driven waves of migration.
Sruthil Mathew is a final year Direction student at the premiere film school established by Government of Kerala, the K. R Narayanan National Film Institute. His films have been selected for special mention at Ji.hlava IDFF 2024, awarded at the VGIK and Alpavirama film festivals and screened at the 71st Oberhausen Film Festival,