Thursday | Oct 26 | 6pm
Screening @ Deluge
En Avant
Watch Online Free: Friday, Oct 27 (24hrs)
Oh Canada Oh Covid
Cooper | 2021 | Canada | 6 min | BC Premiere
Hand processing and tinting/toning techniques transform images of deserted streets and parks into illusory archival footage, shifting an unimaginable present into an unreal past. Photographed on 16mm black and white film and hand-developed in the filmmaker’s bathroom using a DIY developer made from timothy hay and vitamin C supplements, the film’s rich colours are created through hand-toning using concentrated drink mixes sourced from the local grocery store.
Roger D. Wilson (aka Cooper) is an experimental film scientist who lives in Ottawa. He creates his films using techniques such as pixilation, time-lapse photography, hand processing and cameraless animation. Roger is known for his technique of manipulating film emulsion prior to photographing images. He has buried black and white film in soil, bathed it in baking soda, berg colour toner, household bleach and photographic bleach all before photographing images.
monosabishii
Wenhua Shi | 2023 | USA | 4 min | Cdn Premiere
A visual poem is composed, when no one is at home.
Wenhua Shi pursues a poetic approach to moving image making and investigates conceptual depth in film, video, interactive installations and sound sculptures. His work has been presented at museums, galleries and film festivals, including International Film Festival Rotterdam, Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival, International Short Film Festival Hamburg, European Media Art Festival, EXIS, Athens Film and Video Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Crossroads, Pacific Film Archive, West Bund Biennale of Architecture and Contemporary Art, Shanghai, Shenzhen and Hong Kong Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism and the Arsenale of Venice in Italy. He has received awards including New York Foundation for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts and Juror’s Awards from Black Maria Film and Video Festival. He is the founder and one of curators of RPM Fest.
Embers from Yesterday, Aflame.
William Hong-xiao Wei | 2022 | UK | 10 min | W Cdn Premiere
A meditation on withered trees struggling to be reborn. A fleeting glimpse into the seemingly trivial occurrences of daily life. A sheer ecstasy of physical intimacy viewed through celluloid films, in which the life of the emulsion is decaying. During lockdown, film footages were “disinfected” by disinfectant, surface cleanser and hand sanitizer gel: household chemicals which alleged to “kill 99.9% of bacteria and viruses,” and helped us prevent the spread of coronavirus. Returning images that have shapes to the shapeless, in the physical fragility of the cinematic medium, allows for the viewer’s hallucinatory perception of matter in a state of continual creation and dissolution. Through the evocation of the tension between transience and continuity, the film unfolds the dialectic of destruction and metamorphosis.
William Hong-xiao Wei is a PhD candidate and tutor in Film Studies at the University of Edinburgh. He studied Chemical Engineering and Technology in Southeast University until 2014. He then switched to cinema and received a postgraduate degree with distinction in Film Studies from the University of Edinburgh in 2018. He is currently working on a thesis entitled “Contemporary Poetic Cinema through the Lens of Traditional Chinese Poetics,” which attempts to apply traditional Chinese lyric theories and aesthetic concepts to contemporary arthouse cinema. His debut short film Green Thoughts (2020) had its world premiere at FIDMarseille. His latest film premiered in Festival des Cinémas Différents et Expérimentaux de Paris. His works have been in festivals in Berlin, Glasgow, İstanbul, London, Montréal, Moscow, Thessaloniki, among others.
Vista(s)
Lakshya Upadhyay | 2022 | India | 5 min | NA Premiere
A psychologist undergoes an experiment with the analog technology of his time and undertakes a visual journey into his own brain. Welcome to the vistas within.
Born and based in India, Lakshya Upadhyah makes experimental movies that use filmic language to explore beauty and abstract ideas. His creative journey began with short films exploring big ideas including meditation, mind and language, the human species. evolution, society and mental illness. In a new phase of growth, the artist is venturing into long format works inclined towards abstraction and documentary. Upadhyah wishes to create films that express a holistic spirit of support for nature and humanity.
EN AVANT [about a year in MPLS]
Dan S | 2022 | USA | 37 min | Cdn Premiere
A meditative ride through the city during a period of tumult and transition: coming together and falling apart. I spend my days and nights delivering food to affluent shut-ins while observing and enduring the collapse of civilization. I have used this time to document oppressive landscapes created by hostile urban planning, the isolation and segregation of communities by strategically placed interstate highways, concentrations of obscene wealth and the trauma of living under a violent police and military occupation. I see a government that would rather protect itself with razor wire, plywood and concrete barriers than protect my neighbours. I see a community enduring ceaseless anxiety and tension while state helicopters fly above. And I see beautiful ecstatic moments and hope everywhere in this broken place that I love.
Dan S is a writer/director/editor and sometimes camera operator residing in Minneapolis. A recipient of two McKnight Fellowships and The Creative Capital Award for Moving Image, he has been recognized for his experimental narrative and documentary work (More Kind, Invincible Force, Seeking Wellness). Dan uses confrontational structures, poetic imagery and immersive sound to explore technological isolation, destructive masculinity, generational violence and the commodification of human suffering, 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, Kurzfilm Hamburg, Revelation Perth, FLEXFest, Cosmic Rays, Grand Illusion Cinema and a few other places.
Thursday | Oct 26 | 8pm
Screening @ Deluge
The Great Curdling
In-Person Screening: The Great Curdling
Student/Senior $6 (use code 25OFF at checkout)
Watch Online Free: Friday, Oct 27 (24hrs)
Feather Family
Alison Folland | 2023 | USA | 5 min | Cdn Premiere
A voice-to-text soliloquy. A child tastes loneliness, freedom, power and care via an animal simulator game. Roles are rehearsed and reversed.
Alison Folland is a filmmaker and performer. Her short hybrid films engage questions of affect and truth-value, and are directly informed by her experience as an actor in the commercial film industry. Alison’s work has been screened at festivals such as Athens International Film and Video Festival (Ohio), Athens International Film Festival (Greece), Antimatter and Winnipeg Underground Film Festival. As a performer, she has worked with directors such as Gus Van Sant, Todd Haynes and Barbet Schroeder. She is currently teaching Foundations of Visual and Media Arts Production.
murmur
Shawn Chappelle | 2023 | Canada | 9 min | World Premiere
The first video in a forthcoming feature length suite of videos entitled “Singularity.” Singularity being “a hypothetical future point in time at which technological growth becomes uncontrollable and irreversible, resulting in unforeseeable changes to human civilization.” (Wikipedia) Bright, flashy, fleeting and sonically dynamic, murmur as a standalone, is an experimental audio visual montage/collage rumination on the force of life.
A Vancouver-based artist working in experimental time-based media, Shawn Chappelle has been exhibited and screened in multiple museums, galleries and festivals throughout the 90s and early 00s including MOMA New York, MOCA LA, Art Gallery of Ontario and National Gallery of Canada. Chappelle is back in the saddle after a 20-year hiatus with new explosively rich audio visual pieces, murmur being the 1st in an upcoming suite of experimental videos.
Half Life
Laura Iancu | 2023 | Romania | 4 min | Cdn Premiere
Different worlds at different time scales.
Laura Iancu is a visual artist working primarily in experimental video forms and immersive 3D animation and gaming. Originally from Romania, she has been learning, teaching and making images in the USA for more than a decade. Currently she is an assistant professor of film production at Virginia Tech, School of Performing Arts. Thematically she works around issues of ecology, civic resistance, aspects of aspirational normative femininity and forms of humour as subversion mechanisms for prescriptive discourses and representations. Her work is experimental in structure and originates from blending aspects of sound art, poetry, magic realism, pop/internet culture, gaming, gardening and the mutations of contemporary technology. Recently Iancu has finalized a series of short documentaries in collaboration with local growers and scientists on soil vitality in biodynamic farming and rural traditions of the Blue Ridge and Piedmont regions of Virginia.
the air we breathe
Christina Battle | 2023 | Canada | 9 min | BC Premiere
the air we breathe is an experimental documentary that thinks through the complexities of air pollution by weaving together themes of environmental catastrophe, environmental racism, cultural and political shifts and conspiracy. Combining research into air pollution along with personal storytelling and speculative imaginings, this project deeply considers the complicated ways in which our air impacts us: from the way that smells travel through it and the memories they evoke; to the physical impacts of pollutants through shared inhalation; to the ways in which the air serves as a metaphor of connection in a cultural sense.
Christina Battle’s research and artistic work consider the parameters of disaster, looking to it as action, as more than mere event and instead as a framework operating within larger systems of power. She has exhibited internationally in festivals and galleries, most recently at Capture Photography Festival (Vancouver), Forum Expanded at the Berlinale (Berlin), Small Arms Inspection Building (Mississauga), Blackwood Gallery (Mississauga), Trinity Square Video (Toronto), Untitled Art Society (Calgary), Nuit Blanche (Toronto), Galveston Artist Residency (Texas), Studio XX (Montréal), Le Centre des arts actuels Skol as part of Le Mois de la Photo à Montréal, Thames Art Gallery (Chatham ON), Casa Maauad (Mexico City) and SOMArts (San Francisco).
Light and Land
Kyath Battie | 2023 | Canada | 7 min | World Premiere
The contrasting topographies in Light and Land disrupt familiar visions of Canadian landscapes so that the specifics of each scene are understood in more complex terms. Lingering somewhere between fantasy and realism, this futuristic documentary underscores atmospheric phenomenon within mysterious environmental incongruence.
Kyath Battie is a Canadian filmmaker with specific interests in mysteries, landscapes and sound design. Her work often explores nocturnal spaces and fictionalized encounters, examining the duality of realism and fantasy, through hybrid fiction and intimate non-fiction portraits. Working fluently in 16mm, photo-chemical processes and digital forms, her work often embodies story elements such as tension and anticipation through acute site-specific cinematography and soundscapes.
Her work has been shown at festivals and galleries internationally, including Ji.Hlava IDFF (Prague), L’Alternativa Film Festival (Barcelona), Oberhausen Kurzfilmtage (Germany), Edinburgh International Film Festival, Images Festival (Canada), Rotterdam IDFF, National Screen Institute (Canada), WNDX Festival of Moving Image (Canada), Ann Arbor Film Festival (USA), Experimental Film Guanajuato (Mexico), Antimatter (Canada), Yorkton Film Festival, School of Art Gallery (University of Manitoba), Lobocine – Films From the Science New Wave and The Singapore Art Science Museum.
The Great Curdling
Jennet Thomas | 2022 | UK | 25 min | Cdn Premiere
The Great Curdling is a folk-sci-fi film, a darkly comic musical exploring the feeling that collective reality is at tipping point. A middle-class family are adjusting to a new kind of happy, now they have consumed a transformative liquid technology that helps re-structure them from the inside. The father is interrogated by an Alexa-like voice and his answers build a picture of a world where “animals ended” but mourning them is taboo. Meanwhile, on the shores of a strangely altered sea, two outcast women meet accidentally when they are attacked by autonomous flying packages. They sing about the Curdlings—some unspeakable intermingling of bio-tech horror and Fascism. Although the sea is dying, it’s spawning something that could be new life—fantastical creatures that are half-cartoon and take the form of tiny flexing hands. A funeral cult has formed, worshiping this new phenomena. They are teaching the exiled women how to re-format the colonized, curdled bodies of the dead into a new substance.
Jennet Thomas makes films, performances and installations exploring connections between fantasy, ideology and everyday life. Often darkly comic and absurd, they collide genres and explore collective constructions of meaning.
Her work emerged from the anarchistic, experimental culture of London’s film/live art scene in the 1990s, when she was co-founder of the Exploding Cinema collective. Thomas’s works have shown widely in different forms—large-scale sculptural installations that physically surround the film, sometimes with continuous live performance inside these installations—and also at many international film festivals. She’s had two major solo shows at Matt’s Gallery London and over 12 solo video installation shows in venues across the world. Her films have been featured in spotlight programmes at venues including Light Industry New York, Kurzfilmfestival Koln, The Pleasure Dome Toronto and her films have screened at festival such as European Media Arts Festival, IFF Rotterdam and museums such as Tate Britain and MOMA New York. She is a Reader in Time Based Media and Performance at University of the Arts, London.