Tuesday | Oct 22 | 6pm
Screening @ Deluge
Spark from a Falling Star
Watch Online Free: Wednesday, Oct 23 (24hrs)
Wasp Radial
Leighton Pierce | 2023 | USA | 8 min | Cdn Premiere
Pierce has recently created hundreds of short reflective loops to stimulate subtle alterations in states of mind. He shoots and processes them entirely on his phone in order to bring the active video “meaning-making” process into his daily lived experience. Wasp Radial takes advantage of synergies and leaps among some of these loops and then extends them toward proto-narrative—the moment when an objective narrative is first detected.
Taking a holistic approach to video making and installations, embracing all aesthetic/technical aspects as an entangled web of symbiotic relationships, Pierce’s work has been widely screened at over 500 film festivals with numerous awards and accolades. His major multi-channel video installations, designed to de-objectify the video viewing experience, have been presented at Sundance and Ann Arbor Film Festivals, the Kochi (India) Biennial, University of Iowa Museum of Art and Sheldon Museum of Art. His single channel works have screened at museums including the Whitney Biennial, Pompidou Museum and MOMA. He has been a faculty member and leader in academia at three distinguished institutions: University of Iowa, Pratt Institute and CalArts.
Night Over R32
Felix Dierich | 2023 | Germany | 3 min | NA Premiere
At night, R32 is like a kaleidoscope. The colourful lights are as manifold as the occupants are diverse, living close together and yet worlds apart.
Felix Dierich grew up in Lübeck. He studied computer science as well as arts and media at the University of Oldenburg. His short films and video installations are experimental documentaries, providing new (in)sights and unseen points of view in an unusual, hypnotic or playful way, combined with immersive sound.
Light, Noise, Smoke and Light, Noise, Smoke
Tomonari Nishikawa | 2023 | Japan | 6 min | Cdn Premiere
The alternation of shots of fireworks filmed at a summer festival in Japan, producing a distinctive yet organic rhythm, as well as a gap between the visual and sound, both of which are produced by the photographic images on the 16mm filmstrip.
Tomonari Nishikawa’s films explore the idea of documenting situations/phenomena through a chosen medium and technique, often focusing on process itself. His films have been screened at numerous film festivals and art venues, including Berlinale, Edinburgh International Film Festival, Hong Kong International Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, London Film Festival, Media City Film Festival, New York Film Festival, Singapore International Film Festival and Toronto International Film Festival. Nishikawa started using a 16mm film projector for his performance projects in 2013, scratching the film emulsion to produce the visual and sound. His on-going 16mm film projection performance project, “Six Seventy-Two Variations,” have been performed at Cosmic Rays Film Festival, Exploratorium in San Francisco, FRACTO in Berlin, New York Film Festival, Shapeshifters Cinema in Oakland, among others. He is one of the co-founders of KLEX (Kuala Lumpur Experimental Film, Video & Music Festival) and Transient Visions: Festival of the Moving Image. He is based in Vestal, NY, and Tokyo, Japan. Nishikawa teaches in the Cinema Department at Binghamton University.
Machine Learning
Patrick Anthony Tarrant | 2024 | UK | 16 min | World Premiere
The analytic film projector is a machine for learning that allows you to pause the 16mm image, but can also be hand-wound to produce variable pitch audio. Here, two such projectors face-off in an attempt to harvest information about the world from each other and from the educational films they convey. Projectors and projection interact to produce the kind of figural possibilities that are likely to befuddle and bemuse the artificial mind, if not the human kind too.
Patrick Tarrant is an experimental filmmaker who has screened at the London, Hong Kong, Cork and Melbourne Film Festivals. Patrick has written on non-fiction filmmaking, from documentary to the portrait film, to home movies, while developing a hybrid filmmaking technique that combines digital cinematography with the spinning mechanism of a 16mm film projector.
Fractures Chimiques – ON/OFF
Charles-André Coderre, Mathieu Arsenault | 2024 | Canada | 6 min | W Cdn Premiere
Fractures Chimiques – ON/OFF is the result of an audiovisual performance combining 16mm projection and reactive electronic music. Using a sensor device attached directly to the screen, the light information escaping from the projectors is collected and transferred to modular synthesizers which generate the film’s live soundtrack.
Charles-André Coderre lives and works in Montreal. He makes films and works on 16mm live projections for film and music performances. His films are distributed by Light Cone (Paris), CFMDC (Toronto) and Vidéographe (Montréal). Since 2017, he co-organizes the OK LÀ! music and expanded cinema series in Verdun (Canada).
Mathieu Arsenault is an electronic musician and sound artist from Montreal. He is interested in the transformation and incorporation of the voice and the body in digital art practices. More recently, he focuses on the relationship between sound and image, which he develops through his collaborations with filmmaker Charles-André Coderre and video artist Véro Marengère. His latest collaboration with Coderre has been presented at various festivals including Mutek Montréal and International Film Festival Rotterdam.
Spark from a Falling Star
Ross Meckfessel | 2023 | USA | 21 min | Cdn Premiere
In Spark from a Falling Star, an odd, unseen alien presence arrives: one that, beyond the usual fondness for abduction, transforms people into objects, public spaces to private real estate. At home in a world of windows and reflections, it floats unmoored through the real and virtual alike. While the world is devoured in its never-ending thirst for conquest, every zone becomes imprinted by the arrival.
Ross Meckfessel is an artist and filmmaker who works primarily in Super 8 and 16mm film. His films often emphasize materiality and poetic structures while depicting the condition of modern life through an exploration of apocalyptic obsession, contemporary ennui and the technological landscape.
Tuesday | Oct 22 | 8pm
Screening @ Deluge
Dissolution of the Landscape
In-Person Screening: Dissolution of the Landscape
Student/Older Adult $6 (use code 25OFF at checkout)
Watch Online Free: Wednesday, Oct 23 (24hrs)
Positive Transparencies
Marianne Thodas | 2023 | Canada | 7 min | W Cdn Premiere
Positive Transparencies captures the tensions arising from the destruction and reconstruction of 17 individual 35mm slides. Using Hornby Island as its focal point, the film explores the methods of observing, transforming and transmuting the natural world through technology. Employing analog deconstruction, the project repurposes the island’s landscapes, creating dynamic motion sequences that emulate a process of artistic disintegration.
Marianne Thodas is a lesbian filmmaker and sound artist based in Vancouver, BC. Interested in expanded modes of film and sound production, her pieces contextualize images and sounds of the familiar. During her BFA at Simon Fraser University’s School for the Contemporary Arts, she studied with filmmakers and theorists whose work specialized in challenging the traditional boundaries between creative and critical practice in film. Inspired by the thematic, narrative and technological experimentation taught during her degree, Thodas has fashioned a special brand of hybrid film to examine topics of memory, belonging, mortality, lineage and place-based attachment. Thodas also works with artist-run organizations—such as Cineworks Independent Filmmakers Society—to run workshops and create community-based initiatives promoting engagement with independent cinema.
Wanderer
Ella Morton | 2024 | Canada/Faroe Islands | 12 min | World Premiere
A music video for Linda Catlin Smith’s contemporary piece, Wanderer. Performed by the Thin Edge New Music Collective in Toronto and filmed on location in the Faroe Islands.
Ella Morton is a Canadian visual artist and filmmaker. Her expedition-based practice has brought her to residencies and projects across Canada, Scandinavia, Greenland and Antarctica. She uses experimental analogue processes to capture the sublime and fragile qualities of remote landscapes. Her films have screened internationally, including Vancouver International Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Montreal International Documentary Festival, Future of Film Showcase, Antimatter Media Art, Dawson City International Short Film Festival and Alchemy Film & Media Arts Festival.
War Zone
Dominic Angerame | 2024 | USA | 7 min | Cdn Premiere
“In War Zone, Dominic Angerame revisits his personal experience (like no other) as artist-in-residence, exploring a symbol that once stood for political, social and cultural divisions brought about and shaped by the Korean War, which are now more ambiguous, nuanced and multi-layered than ever. Filmed in the Korean Demilitarized Zone in 2005, War Zone commemorates the 50th anniversary of the Korean Armistice Agreement, documenting Angerame’s unique take on the history, geopolitics and present-day of the DMZ, which emerges as a complex site that goes well beyond its borders.” — Kornelia Boczkowska
Originally from New York, Dominic Angerame lives, teaches and works in San Francisco. Since 1969, he has made more than 35 films that have been shown and won awards in film festivals around the world. Angerame teaches filmmaking/cinema studies/criticism at the University of California Berkeley, at the San Francisco Art Institute and has also been a guest lecturer and visiting artist at a lot of institutes. He has been the Executive Director of Canyon Cinema for the past thirty years.
Oxygen
Karel Doing | 2023 | UK | 6 min | W Cdn Premiere
Blades of grass race across the screen.
Karel Doing is an independent artist, filmmaker and researcher whose practice investigates the relationship between culture and nature by means of analogue and organic process, experiment and co-creation. He studied Fine Arts at the Hogeschool voor de Kunsten, in Arnhem, the Netherlands, graduating in 1990. He was a founder member of Studio één and Filmbank. Doing completed his PhD at the University of the Arts London in 2017. During his research he developed “phytography,” a technique that combines plants and photochemical emulsion. He has employed this technique to investigate how culture and meaning can be shared between the human and the vegetal realm. His writing about eco-literacy and cinema has been published internationally. His work has been shown worldwide at festivals, in cinemas, clubs, galleries and museums. He regularly gives workshops in experimental film and photography practice and is currently lecturer in contextual studies at Ravensbourne University London.
lessons on flight
Cecilia Araneda | 2024 | Canada/Chile | 4 min | W Cdn Premiere
Shot on B&W 16mm film, eco-processed with olives and hand coloured on site in rural Chile, lessons on flight examines the flight patterns of the green-backed firecrown hummingbird.
Cecilia Araneda is a Chilean-Canadian filmmaker and curator who came to Canada as a child, together with her family, as a refugee from Chile's right-wing military dictatorship. She currently lives in Winnipeg. She holds a BFA from York University and an MFA from UBC, and is also a three-time alumna of the fabled Film Farm. Araneda's short films have been presented at film festivals, artist-run centres and art museums around the world, and have been recognized with various awards and distinctions nationally and internationally.
La dissolution du paysage [The dissolution of the landscape]
Anne-Marie Bouchard | 2024 | Canada | 24 min | W Cdn Premiere
Through visual metaphors, this film offers an incursion into an inner landscape, a dive into subconscious, a mix of childhood memories and recurrent dreams, between surrealism and automatism.
Anne-Marie Bouchard lives and works in Québec City. She has been making videos since 1999. Her films are an experimental, avant-garde experience—impressionistic and evocative: a cinema of poetry. She is a seeker of images, a discoverer of sounds, an explorer of cinema and media art, her work intimate, eclectic and artisanal. Her films delve into the ephemeral and the fragile, gesture and disappearance. She is interested in the impact colour and sound have on the emotive body, and in revealing the aesthetic potential in images of the everyday.