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71 50

MW Crater | 2024 | USA | 9 min | Cdn Premiere

71 50 demonstrates the physical process of decay and the concept of buried film as ethnographic entity. This work is a filmed document of the remaining campus of Black Mountain College and a visualization of environmental factors leading toward decay. After processing, the film was buried on the campus grounds for 55 days. The soil, temperature and overall environmental conditions have shaped the emulsion of the film stock, dissolving the image as it advances.

MW Crater is a researcher and PhD student at SUNY Buffalo.

Luz ígnea [Igneous light]

Catalina Giordano | 2024 | Argentina/Germany/Spain | 9 min | Cdn Premiere

In the ruins of the Disibodenberg monastery, the voice of Hildegard von Bingen sneaks through the walls. As the day goes by, the space empties of people, and with the arrival of the night, a vision emerges.

Catalina Giordano studied Film Direction in Buenos Aires at the University of Cinema, Curator of Arts at the National University of the Arts of Argentina and a master’s degree in Film Archive and Preservation at the Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola in Donostia, Basque Country. Besides her drive for filmmaking, she’s interested in film programming and curating. Experimental cinema has always been a very important in Giordano’s field of study and research, in her training as a filmmaker and teacher, but above all as a refuge. Giordano is currently working on screening projects and teaching workshops around experimental cinema and creative filmwork via archives. In 2021, she released her first music EP called Terrario, under the name of Lidna.

DiElectric Drift

David Sherman | 2024 | USA | 7 min | Cdn Premiere

A charged meditation on impermanence and entropy explored through Robert Smithson’s  Spiral Jetty and early video art. Using hand processed 16mm film and analog video synthesis, DiElectric Drift asks what an artist is capable of creating in time, and what do monumental yet fleeting gestures ultimately mean.

David Sherman is a filmmaker, media artist, curator and educator whose work addresses the psychogeography of hidden “landscapes.” His work looks at how cultural histories are stored and evidenced in media materiality; it is an expanded cinema of essayistic forms, chance operation, image archives, collaged sound and photochemical/electronic manipulation. Equally central to Sherman’s practice is 20+ years of creating public experimental media spaces: DIY microcinemas and public media interventions that materialize as new community collaborations. Sherman’s works have been exhibited extensively at film festivals, museums and alternative venues throughout the world including The Whitney Biennial, New York Film Festival, Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art and Musée National d’Art Modern, Paris. Sherman co-founded Total Mobile Home Microcinema in San Francisco in 1992 and Exploded View Microcinema in Tucson in 2014. For 12 years Sherman was Administrative Director of Canyon Cinema Filmmakers Cooperative. Sherman has taught at California College of the Arts and currently teaches video and computational arts in the School of Information at the University of Arizona.

Valley Pride

Lukas Marxt | 2023 | Austria/USA | 15 min | Cdn Premiere

The seemingly extraterrestrial camera eye floats upside down through a palm grove planted in a strictly rectilinear manner. Nature is literally upside down and existing in an artificial order as a business game. Only at the crescendo of the strange, smouldering soundtrack by Jung an Tagen does the gaze slowly turn clockwise. Then, cut: quietness, open space. At some point the logo “Valley Pride” can be read in the middle of the California desert, on oversized corrugated iron sheets, designating one of the most important commercial areas of US industrial agriculture. It’s an inhospitable place, whose increasingly bizarre unnaturalness is conveyed through Marxt’s unmistakable approach. The monocultural agrarian symmetry and its ballet of irrigation testify to man’s self-extinction in the service of constant profit orientation.

Lukas Marxt is an artist and a filmmaker living and working between Cologne and Graz. Marxt´s interest is in the dialogue between human and geological existence, and the impact of man upon nature. His works have been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions, most recently at Torrance Art Museum, The Biennial of Painting, Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens and Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Rijeka. His films have been presented in numerous international film festivals including Berlinale, Curtas Vila do Conde, Gijón International Film Festival and Locarno Film Festival. Since 2017, Marxt has spent considerable time in Southern California, where he has researched ecological and socio-political structures surrounding the Salton Sea.

The Lost Season

Kelly Sears | 2023 | USA | 6 min | Cdn Premiere

Earth is experiencing its final winter. A streaming company hires all available camera operators to film the final weeks of this soon-to-be-lost season. After seeing their footage as a form of ecological exploitation, the camera operators refuse to commodify further climate collapse with their labour.  

Kelly Sears is an experimental animator that recasts and reframes American archetypes and institutions to reimagine our own social and political legacy. She views animation as a critical practice; cutting out and collaging as a way to intervene and expand the context of appropriated source materials. Through combining animated photographic and film documents with speculative storytelling, each of her films contains recognizable cultural narratives that take fictional twists, becoming uncanny or fantastic as history merges with myth. Her award-winning films have screened at festivals such as Sundance, South by Southwest, American Film Institute, Los Angeles Film Festival, Off+Camera Film Festival, Poland, Festival International de Films de Femmes de Créteil, France, Tricky Women in Austria and programs of her short work have shown at the Pacific Film Archives in Berkeley, Anthology Film Archives in NYC, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, The Portland Art Museum and the SF Cinematheque. Sears received her MFA from the University of California, San Diego and previously taught at Pitzer College, Scripps College, Rice University and the University of Houston before joining the faculty at the University of Colorado.

Borderland

Isabelle Hayeur | 2024 | Canada/USA | 12 min | World Premiere

At the improvised stops of a migrant camp, I film the paltry shelters of nationals from Mexico, Central America, Pakistan and China. Making campfires with a few scattered desert shrubs, caught between worry and despair, they are waiting to be picked up. Through the glimmering haze I can make out their blank gazes staring into the void, their faces burdened with fatigue, sweat and dust. The calming effect produced by the volunteers who distributed water, food and blankets a short time ago is fading fast. By dawn tomorrow, the camp will be gone, the desert deserted, the crossing already in the past. In the light of dusk it is still possible to glimpse places strewn with disparate objects and abandoned clothing, leftovers from barely touched meals and a campfire still burning. A chiaroscuro of shadows and embers. I think of such little consideration and the ruined American dream. On the icy sand I find a cushion bearing an inscription: “DREAM.”

Isabelle Hayeur is a neurodivergent artist known for her photographs and her experimental videos. Her work is situated within a critical approach to the environment, urban development and to social conditions. Since the late 1990s, she has been probing the territories she goes through to understand how our contemporary civilizations take over and fashion their environments. She is concerned about the evolution of places and communities in the neoliberal sociopolitical context we currently live in. She has created more than 30 experimental video art pieces and several video installations. Her works have been shown at Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Arts, Neuer Berliner Kunstverein and at Les Rencontres internationales de la photographie à Arles, amongst others. She has also actively participated in international artists’ residencies and festivals. Screenings include Images Festival, Antimatter, Videoformes, Transmediale, FILE electronic language international festival, FIFA, LOOP Videoart, Les instants vidéo and Les rencontres internationales Paris/Berlin.