Thursday | Oct 23 | 6pm

Screening @ Deluge

River of Days

Found and manipulated footage addressing past and future, impermanence and injustice, conflict and catharsis.

Watch Online Free: Friday, Oct 24 (24hrs)

Everest

Eric Walker | 2025 | Canada | 6 min | W Cdn Premiere

Everest is an experimental boxing documentary. The work is structured as a series of four fights. The fights are introduced by a commentator, followed by a spotlight on boxers, then three or four bouts until finally, Everest, the fight of the century. 

Visual and media artist Eric Walker studied video art with Dara Birnbaum at the Nova Scotia College of Art in the 1970s. His artworks are in numerous public and private collections including Canada Council Art Bank, Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Beaverbrook Art Gallery, Owens Art Gallery and Ottawa Art Gallery.

Sudden Tourniquet

Janie Geiser | 2024 | USA | 8 min | Cdn Premiere

Medical illustrations and paper model buildings merge with images of cultivated and wild plants in an elliptical journey toward ephemerality. Bodies lose their volume and exist, somehow, without flesh. Now they are outlines, traveling through indeterminate spaces, domestic and otherwise. Cut open, but not bleeding, what do we see when we no longer have eyes?

Janie Geiser is an internationally recognized experimental filmmaker and visual/theatre artist, whose work is known for its investigation of the emotional power of inanimate objects, its sense of mystery, and its strength of design. “…Geiser gives voice to the reaches of the unconscious, pointing to the abandoned splendor that exists prior to the rules of society and language.” (Holly Willis, Res, 2004) In addition to her film practice, Geiser has made a significant contribution to the field of contemporary performance with her innovative, hypnotic live performances that integrate performing objects and projection. She began making films in 1990, first as an element of her performance work, and then as a separate form. In 1994, she made her first film that was intended exist outside of live performance, The Red Book. An instant classic, The Red Book was screened as part of the 1996 New Directors/New Films series at The Museum of Modern Art and was later selected for inclusion in the Smithsonian’s National Film Registry. Geiser’s films have screened at the Museum of the Moving Image, Whitney Museum of American Art, Guggenheim Museum, Museum of Modern Art, Berkley Art Museum’s Pacific Film Archives, Centre Pompidou, Salzberg Museum, San Francisco MOMA, LACMA, Redcat, The Getty, The Academy Museum, Filmforum Los Angeles and at numerous festivals internationally. Geiser’s films are in the permanent collection of Museum of Modern Art, New York Public Library’s Donnell Media Center, Berkley Art Museum Pacific Film Archive and California Institute of the Arts. The Archive of the Academy of Motion Pictures has selected her body of work for preservation in their archive of experimental films.

5-cent American Flag

Vito A. Rowlands | 2024 | Belgium/USA | 6 min | Cdn Premiere

5-cent American Flag takes a forensic approach to the conspiracy-fueled events of JFK’s assassination, creating an abstract cryptopolitical thriller that begs the question: which flags are we flying? More than 4,800 unique 5-cent American postage stamps from 1963 anxiously flutter across the screen, each bearing unique cancellation marks and slogans that become coded messages. The stamps were animated frame by frame over the distorted airwaves from a Gray Audograph recording of Dallas Police Department Presidential Motorcade communications on November 22, 1963, used by the FBI for acoustic gunshot analysis to determine the position of the shooter and the amount of gunshots. When words are absent on the soundtrack, custom-created rubber stamps applied to clear leader form black-inked cancellation marks that become enigmatic air waves, and red-inked U.S. flags are stamped and folded into the reel after the fatal gunshot(s) is heard on the tape, transforming into pareidolic bloodstain patterns that flood the screen.

Vito A. Rowlands is a Belgian filmmaker and scholar. His feature script Elvis, We Like Your Music was a finalist at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival Development Track and his award-winning shorts have played around the world at venues such as the Ann Arbor Film Festival, Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival, Vienna Shorts, Aesthetica, Cadence Video Poetry Festival, Raindance, Brooklyn Film Festival, HollyShorts, Dresdner Schmalfilmtage, Mostra Internazionale del Cinema di Genova and Nitehawk Shorts. Rowlands has taught in Amsterdam, Brussels and Copenhagen, as well as at Columbia University. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Experimental Film and Media at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and a 16mm film instructor at Mono No Aware in Brooklyn. He is a co-author of Screening Statues: Sculpture and Cinema and the author of Velvet Curtains and Gilded Frames: The Art of Early European Cinema.

Subhuman Services

Dan S | 2024 | USA | 16 min | Cdn Premiere

Reflections on personal and systemic failures woven into a thorough archival analysis and interpretation of The Department of Human Services hold music. “An archival fever dream sparked by the maddening drone of government hold music. Beneath its deadpan surface lies a slow-motion howl, part personal reckoning, part institutional exorcism, where glitchy bureaucracy, broken systems and the low hum of futility coalesce into a sonic essay on the dehumanizing churn of so-called public service.” (CUFF)

Dan is a writer/director/editor and sometimes camera operator currently residing in Minneapolis, Minnesota. A recipient of two McKnight Fellowships (2010/2016) and The Creative Capital Award for Moving Image (2015), he has been recognized for his experimental narrative and documentary work. Dan uses unconventional structures, poetic imagery and immersive sound to explore technological isolation, destructive masculinity, generational violence and the commodification of human suffering by the media industry, among other things. His work has been seen at Anthology Film Archives, The Walker Art Center, MoMA, Ann Arbor Film Festival, True/False Film Festival, Fantasia, Fantastic Fest, Athens International Film & Video, Kurzfilm Hamburg, Filmstock International, Cellular Cinema, Revelation Perth, Antimatter, FLEXFest, Cosmic Rays, Grand Illusion Cinema, Trylon Microcinema and a few other places. In addition to his production activity, Dan is a board member of The Northern Film Alliance, participant in The Bentson Critical Group at Walker Art Center, jury member of EDU and Mimesis film festivals, curator of the MN Unearthed Film Series and programmer of 2022 Duluth Superior Film Festival.

On the Glue

Dave Johnson | 2025 | Canada | 3 min | W Cdn Premiere

From the depths of London England’s Barracks district amongst the derelict weapons huts, comes a public service expose from the 1970s revealing “THE HORRORS” of kids participating in the act of glue sniffing. The narrative is told in three parts: The reporter, a mother and her “addict son” David. Seeking to reveal systemic problems and stereotypes of addiction and mental health the film and its title have been appropriated from an 1970s BBC expose. In making the film the filmmaker and footage were exposed to glue through sandwiching pieces of film together before ripping them apart.

Dave Johnson’s art practice focuses on experimenting with new, expired or existing (found) footage on emulsion-based media. His practice also extends to constructing DIY sound devices to create his soundtracks. The themes of his work range from traditional street photography to impressions and expressions of curiosities and his perception of the world and cultures he plunges himself into. His films have played at numerous festivals and galleries and streaming services internationally. In addition to his practice, he has taught at post secondary institutions, artist-run centres and online workshops. Dave a member of the Lightproof Film Collective (Ottawa) and Raw Stock! Film Collective (Victoria).

Postmodern Romance

Wheeler Winston Dixon | 2024 | USA | 5 min | Cdn Premiere

“Postmodernism represents a moment of suspension before the batteries are recharged for the new millennium, an acknowledgment that preceding the future is a strange and hybrid interregnum that might be called the last gasp of the past.” – Gilbert Adair

Wheeler Winston Dixon is the James Ryan Professor Emeritus of Film Studies at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, and, with Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, editor of the book series Quick Takes: Movies and Popular Culture for Rutgers University Press, which has to date published more than twenty volumes on various cultural topics. He is the author of more than thirty books on film history, theory and criticism, as well as more than 100 articles in various academic journals. He is also an active experimental filmmaker, whose works are in the permanent collection of The Museum of Modern Art. His recent video work is collected in the UCLA Film and Television Archive. He has also taught at The New School, Rutgers University and the University of Amsterdam.

His works have been screened at The Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, Anthology Film Archives, Filmhuis Cavia (Amsterdam), Studio 44 (Stockholm), La lumière collective (Montréal), The BWA Katowice Museum (Poland), The Microscope Gallery, The National Film Theatre (UK), The Jewish Museum, The Millennium Film Workshop, The San Francisco Cinématheque, LA Filmforum (Los Angeles), The New Arts Lab, The Exploding Cinema (London), The Collective for Living Cinema, The Kitchen, The Filmmakers Cinématheque, Film Forum, The Amos Eno Gallery, Sla 307 Art Space, The Gallery of Modern Art, The Rice Museum, The Oberhausen Film Festival, Undercurrent, Experimental Response Cinema in addition to screenings at numerous film festivals worldwide.

Ghost Protists

Sasha Waters | 2024 | UK/USA | 5 min | Cdn Premiere

A protist is an organism that is neither animal, vegetable nor fungi. Plant-like protists are called algae—such as those “flowers of the sea” cyanotypes created by Anna Atkins and published in a landmark book in 1843. In a mesmerizing frenzy of images and text, Ghost Protists transforms her images into a protest of the colonial violence that enabled their creation.  

Sasha Waters is a moving image artist and Professor of Film at Virginia Commonwealth University. In 2026, she will release Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World, a documentary portrait of the beloved poet. Her films have screened at the Telluride Film Festival, IFF Rotterdam, Kassel Dokfest, Microscope Gallery, the Tribeca, Ann Arbor, Woodstock, Chicago Underground, Big Sky Documentary Film Festivals and the Museum of the Moving Image among other international locales.  

River of Days

Mark Street | 2025 | USA | 7 min | Cdn Premiere

Using hundreds of transparent photographic stills animated on a lightbox and abstract Super 8 footage, the film meditates on the illusory nature of the passage of time.

Mark Street graduated from Bard College (B.A, 1986) and the San Francisco Art Institute (M.F.A., 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 the San Francisco Cinematheque (1986, 1992, 2009). His work has appeared at the Tribeca (5 times), Sundance, Rotterdam, New York, London, San Francisco, New York Underground, Sarajevo, Viennale, Ourense (Spain), Mill Valley, South by Southwest and other film festivals. He is Assistant Professor of Film in the Visual Art Department at Fordham University – Lincoln Center where he teaches film/video production and other courses that engage contemporary artistic practice.

Thursday | Oct 23 | 8pm

Screening @ Deluge

The Unpredictable Character

Bodies at rest and in motion—as sites of contention and control, comfort and community.

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