Wednesday | Oct 21 | 6pm
Screening @ Deluge
Remains Unsaid
In-Person Screening: Remains Unsaid
Student/Older Adult $6 (use code 25OFF at checkout)
Watch Online Free: Thursday, Oct 22 (24hrs)
bearing fruit of fondness, Grounds of Coherence #2
Shen Xin | 2025 | China/UK | 6 min | Cdn Premiere
Filmed in Northern Isle of Skye, bearing fruit of fondness is a 16mm black and white film hand processed with a type of invasive cotoneaster that is native to Eastern Asia, brought to the UK in the 19th century as an ornamental plant. Working with elemental kinship, the process guides a capacity to relate to pain while grounded in the understanding of interdependence, where concept of belonging erodes through patterns of mother-child relationships that extend to nation and citizen, land and dweller. The film features a single-take vocal performance of the script in Chinese by Shen Xin, interspersed with breath and stillness against the Southwest storms heard from their home.
Grounded in sustained study and practice in relation to the nature of mind, Shen Xin works with moving image, sound, text, painting, performance and installation. In recognizing the fundamental social responsibilities inherent in interconnectedness, their work often unfolds through time-based processes that attend closely to elemental kinship, language, physical movement, sonic environments and socio-political boundaries. The making is an ongoing inquiry into the causes and conditions of all that manifests—across materiality and perception, rhythm and meaning, individual pain and collective liberation. Through engagement with embodied experience, the responsive and unconditional nature of care emerges, as the work mirrors awareness and expressions of capacity, forming both a transformative path and a shared offering.
Xin was born in Chengdu, Sichuan, and currently lives on Northern An t-Eilean Sgitheanach (Isle of Skye). Recent solo exhibitions include Collective, Edinburgh, TINA, Richmond Art Gallery, M HKA, KUNSTVEREIN GARTENHAUS, Swiss Institute in New York and Walker Art Center. Their work has been shown in group exhibitions at Goethe-Institut, Beijing; Ewha Womans University, Seoul; Centre Pompidou, Paris; 14th Shanghai Biennale; 12th Seoul Mediacity Biennale; DAAD, Berlin; MUMA, Melbourne; 13th Gwangju Biennale; Inside Out Museum, Beijing; M+ Museum, Hong Kong; 4th New Museum Triennial; and UCCA, Hebei, Beijing. Past residencies and awards include Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship, Rijksakademie, Amsterdam and the BALTIC Artists’ Award. Public collections include Centre Pompidou, Kadist Art Foundation, De Ying Foundation, M HKA, Walker Art Center, Fosun Foundation, New Century Art Foundation, University of Salford and M+ Museum.
Willow World
Juliet Belisario | 2025 | Canada | 11 min | Cdn Premiere
Filmmaker Juliet Belisario revisits her childhood, interweaving 16mm vignettes and her old child services documents, uncovering the truth she couldn’t voice as a child.
Juliet Belisario is a Toronto-based filmmaker focusing on the inner lives of women and children through intimate social realism. Her award-winning, jury-recognized shorts (Cocoon, Willow World, Devils in the Bush) have screened at TIFF Next Wave, Inside Out and NYAFF, earning praise from acclaimed filmmakers like Guy Maddin and Chase Joynt.
Invisible Harvests
Stephanie Dudley | 2026 | Canada | 6 min | Vic Premiere
Invisible Harvests treats the animation process as fermentation: a slow, transformative breakdown of materials and systems. Through salt, dried kombucha SCOBYs, distressed 16mm film, rice paper text and bubbling ferments, the film traces how traditions and recipes are carried across generations. These lineages are never intact; they arrive fragmented, with missing pieces and distorted instructions.
The film focuses on the sensory residue of care—the persistent joy of everyday rituals that endure as the ground begins to shift. Attention turns toward the small, the peripheral and the nearly imperceptible, where transformation is already underway.
Stephanie Dudley is a Toronto-based artist and filmmaker working in stop-motion animation and analogue film. Her tactile, material-driven practice incorporates macro photography, found materials and hand-printed text to explore attention, living systems and perception. This work grew out of almost three decades in motion graphics and broadcast design for film and television and a foundation in fine art and photography. Invisible Harvests premiered in the Official Short Films Competition at Annecy 2026; her first film, Little Theatres: Homage to the Mineral of Cabbage, screened at TIFF and more than 50 festivals worldwide. Her work attends to what persists beneath visibility and language.
Hiding Places
Magdalena Bermudez | 2025 | USA | 12 min | Cdn Premiere
Women pretend to be rocks. Military operations masquerade as art education. One woman deserts to pursue a more radical act of unselfing.
Magdalena Bermudez is a filmmaker and educator whose practice examines relations between humans, nonhuman animals, plants and technologies through essayistic film and video works. Her practice is research-based, often recontextualizing scientific or operational images to interrogate their formal and political implications.
Magda received a BA from Hampshire College and an MFA in Cinematic Arts from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Her work has screened internationally at festivals such as Ann Arbor Film Festival, Antimatter [Media Art], European Media Arts Festival, Alchemy Moving Image Festival, Mimesis Documentary Festival, Kasseler DokFest, İstanbul International Experimental Film Festival and Science New Wave Festival. She has received residencies at Marble House, Ellis-Beauregard Foundation and Mount Lebanon. She is an Assistant Professor of Cinema at Binghamton University.
Woolf: Un Cuarto Propio en Bogotá [Woolf: A Room of One’s Own in Bogotá]
Lisa Danker | 2026 | Colombia | 6 min | Cdn Premiere
An experimental portrait of the intellectual spirit, energy and story behind a bookstore named after Virginia Woolf in Bogotá, Colombia. Shot on 16mm film that was hand-processed at La Javeriana (Pontificia Universidad Javeriana) and funded by a 2023 Fulbright U.S. Scholar Award.
Lisa Danker Kritzer specializes in experimental and documentary filmmaking with a recent focus on USA and Latine culture and literature using Super 8mm, 16mm and digital formats. Her work has reached audiences at over 75 national and international venues in locations across the USA, Canada, Europe and South America. In 2023, Lisa was honoured with a Fulbright Scholar fellowship to Bogotá, Colombia. There, she fostered international creative collaboration by leading collective filmmaking workshops.
Remains Unsaid
Dominick Michael Rivers | 2026 | USA | 3 min | World Premiere
Remains Unsaid is a non-film created using a laser engraver. While scanning my late brother’s poetry to disseminate to family, I was fascinated with the overlapping text inherent in the editing process and the visual anomalies created by the Underwood-Olivetti typewriter. This moving image artwork is an assemblage of these artifacts, printed on transparency paper and cut into 16mm strips. The audio was captured from a projection of the film on an Eiki Slim Line.
Dominick Rivers is an experimental moving image artist, musician and educator. By integrating technically outdated forms, he uses moving image artwork to examine the popular media used to capture and sentimentalize memory. His research is focused on developing eco-friendly substitutions for alternative photographic processes that can be implemented with motion picture film. These substitutions demonstrate that commonly accepted techniques can be made more accessible, promote environmental sustainability and remain emotionally exigent.
昑藻虓回大地深砠 [Words Fly Back to the Black Earth]
Xiao Zhang | 2025 | China/USA | 19 min | Cdn Premiere
A calling inhabits the blank pages, unfolding a secret writing. The unseen written traces seep from the murmuring land, pushing through fragmented voices to become new forms—beings made material. Framed as a dialogue with my grandmother, this film explores an alternative form of personal writing by Chinese women in the context of major political events—one that is both absent and abundant. The “blank” becomes an image, carrying a search for agency: of land transformed, of women unheard, of voids rewritten. By breaking down linguistic structures, the film opens a space for imagining, reading and performing, allowing for emergence.
Xiao Zhang is a filmmaker and artist based between Dongguan, China, and Los Angeles. Their work centres on personal poetics derived from intergenerational memory, marginalized communities and mythology. They consider film a haptic medium, a lucid space of traces, absence and exile. They hold an MFA in Film/Video from California Institute of the Arts and a BFA from Beijing Film Academy. Their work has been shown internationally at festivals and museums including MoMA Doc Fortnight Film Festival, BFI London Film Festival, Hong Kong International Film Festival, CROSSROADS, Beijing International Short Film Festival, REDCAT andTai Kwun, among others.
Wednesday | Oct 21 | 8pm
Screening @ Deluge
Endless Sunlight
In-Person Screening: Endless Sunlight
Student/Older Adult $6 (use code 25OFF at checkout)
Watch Online Free: Thursday, Oct 22 (24hrs)
Retracing Karkarook
Dirk De Bruyn, Matthew Berka | 2025 | Australia | 7 min | Cdn Premiere
Retracing Karkarook stumbles through traumatised spaces of Australian suburbia, dredging layers of denial buried beneath the surface of Karkarook, “a sandy place,” an artificial wetland in Moorabbin, Melbourne, built on a former sand quarry and traditional lands of the Boonwurrung people of Kulin Nation. De Bruyn and Berka, separated by 40 years yet both having occupied this region, waywardly trace and retrace its inconspicuous surfaces whilst navigating a fractured technological terrain where analog film and digital collage are collapsed.
Dirk de Bruyn is a Dutch-born Australian filmmaker. His work is focused on the representation of trauma in the moving image. He has made numerous experimental, documentary and animation films and videos over the last 40 years. He received funding to produce a number of films, but has continued to maintain a no-budget, independent, self-funded focus for much of his work. His book The Performance of Trauma in Moving Image Art was published in 2014. His works have been screened internationally. Retrospective programs have been presented at Melbourne International Animation Festival, Alternativa, Serbia, Punto Y Raya, Karlsruhe Germany and Cineinfinito.
Matthew Berka is an artist-filmmaker and composer whose work has been shown in both gallery and cinema presentations. Previous screenings and exhibitions include International Film Festival Rotterdam, Melbourne International Film Festival, Millennium Film Workshop, New York, Onion City Experimental Film Festival, Chicago, Close-Up Cinema, London, Archivio Nazionale del Film di Famiglia, Bologna, Antimatter [media art], Mackintosh Lane, London, Bogong Centre for Sound Culture, Victoria, AUS and ZÉRUÌ, London. Berka also works as a Time-based media conservator for Tate Gallery and contributes to the programming of Mackintosh Lane, an artist-run gallery in East London.
Endless Sunlight
Tyson Houseman | 2025 | Canada | 8 min | Vic Premiere
Centred around an audio recording of a conversation between kokum Penny Roan and Jennifer Houseman (Tyson's grandmother and mother), kokum Penny tells a story about her kokum's experience at a residential school in southern Alberta, sharing that her uncle burned down the school when he was seven years old. Six generations of matriarchal lineage are weaved across time through images of a young woman, Osa Roan, who is Penny Roan's granddaughter, harvesting birch bark at a camp in the summer
Tyson Houseman is a nêhiyaw video artist, performer and filmmaker from Paul First Nation and Ermineskin Cree Nation. Tyson’s practice focuses on aspects of nêhiyaw ideologies and teachings–speaking to land-based notions of non-linear time and the interwoven relations between humans and their ecologies. His work embraces ephemerality, ranging from immersive interactive installations to multimedia live video performance events. He has exhibited at various galleries, museums, screenings and film/media festivals worldwide, including ICA Boston and The Shed in NYC. Most recently he participated in artist residencies at Forge Project, MacDowell and Wassaic Project. Tyson is a recipient of the 2025 “Open Call” commission at The Shed in NYC, a 2025 Forge Project Fellow, a COUSIN Collective Fellow and a 2025 MacDowell Fellow. Along with producing his own works, Tyson directs documentary film and music videos, and is a touring performer on various live cinema performances created by DJ Kid Koala. Tyson has an MFA in Fine Arts from School of Visual Arts in NYC.
Megh |06|
Ayuj Consul | 2026 | India/USA | 5 min | Cdn Premiere
If thoughts opened up onto dreams, one would look up and see in a cloud resting on the hill crest, an elephant poised to butt a riverbank. Handmade crystals of argentum painted on old acetate in the dark. Hopes of seeing the light. Falls back apart on itself. An utterance of royal poet: for fame home left bids cloud voyage journey sail sky far away. Emulsion cracks, base cracks, held by tape on both sides. Palm leaves crumble and 4K scans are pointless, dust gets in anyway. When it rains snakes crawl up into the spines of trees and look closely when the lightning strikes you can see their scales shine in the moonlight.
Ayuj Consul works with writing, image-making and time-based art. His practice often involves an approach of chemical, material and/or camera experimentation. After completing a BFA from Chapman University in Orange, California, he worked as an Assistant Film Curator at Cornucopia Pictures, Mumbai and Italian Cultural Center, New Delhi. A desire to re-learn image making with a new approach led him to work as the Darkroom Manager at the CPB Foundation, Chennai. He is currently an MFA Candidate at the University of Colorado, Boulder. His work has been exhibited at Arthshila (Ahmedabad, India) and CPB Foundation (Chennai, India).
Untitled #1 (Zuzax)
James Fredrick Lawrence | 2026 | USA | 13 min | Cdn Premiere
Untitled #1 (Zuzax) is a found footage piece in quite a literal sense. The material is sourced directly from a 16mm film reel that was discovered buried next to a crumbling shack in the Sandia Mountains of New Mexico. After excavation, the film was intentionally documented in its unearthed state of decay. The footage, along with its dirt, mould and surface oxidation, depicts landscapes and people from the early to mid 1900s and features cotton fields, acequias, cactus and palm trees—locations presumably captured in the Southwestern United States. Much like Bill Morrison’s Decasia, this willful preservation of the film’s decomposition promotes the aging process inherent in the physical media itself. It reads as an indulgent, anti-archival celebration of the disruptive beauty that occurs with neglect and exposure to harsh environmental elements.
The film score was written, performed and recorded by Steve Jansen and Jeph Jerman.
James Fredrick Lawrence is a mixed media artist, sound maker and filmmaker from Albuquerque, New Mexico. Professionally, he works as an Emmy award winning photojournalist, editor and videographer.
Thyla
Stefan Nemeth | 2025 | Austria | 7 min | NA Premiere
Thyla is an attempt to create a coherent whole from primarily independent elements, similar to the components of an ecosystem, which in their entirety form a complex interweaving. Formally, there are three basic components: Super 8 footage of a natural floodplain landscape, colour charts and codes from the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, and historical images of what may be the last specimen of Thylacinus cynocephalus, better known as the Tasmanian wolf, Tasmanian tiger or Kaparunina in the language of the Aborigines. The interpretation of the short film remains open, whereby connections between the parallel strands of silent (nature) observation and a documentation of disappearance or its classification from the outside can be freely established.
In part, the increasingly restless movement through space—perhaps symptomatic of the present—triggers an association with the animal in the enclosure. Ultimately, a species becomes extinct, and in this case also a genus, which has a symbolic character. Current extinction rates at the genus level are significantly higher than those in the past, i.e., before human influence. It is assumed that the massive reduction in biodiversity will lead to a loss of ecosystem function and ultimately to a fundamental transformation of the entire biosphere.
Born in Austria, Stefan Németh works as musician and biologist. With Martin Brandlmayr and John Norman he founded the band Radian, which performed in various international festivals and released a series of albums for Thrill Jockey, Rhiz and Mego. From 2003 until 2008 he was part of Mosz, a record label focusing on electronic productions aside established genres, which he launched and operated with visual artist and filmmaker Michaela Schwentner. In parallel to his activities within live projects and the label, Németh has been working with directors of short films and experimental videos. A selection of restructured film scores led to the release of his first solo record Film (Thrill Jockey, 2008), an album which was subsequently performed live with Steven Hess and Martin Siewert. Current activities include the band Innode with Steven Hess (Locrian, Pan.American, Cleared) and Bernhard Breuer (Elektro Guzzi, Tumido), music for films and his solo project.
Atlas Maria
Flora Reznik | 2026 | Netherlands/Argentina | 22 min | Cdn Premiere
A filmmaker journeys through archives, jungles and imagined memories to retrace her great-aunt—one of the first women explorers of the Amazon—blending history and myth into a playful meditation on exploration, adventure and inherited stories.
Flora Reznik is a visual artist and filmmaker based in Netherlands. Her practice is shaped by artistic research, and her projects are non medium bound: she makes films, installations, interdisciplinary events and publications. Her work deals with issues of inheritance, identity and archival materials and is grounded in the relationships between landscape, history and the body—exploring how physical space holds memory, how migration and colonization shape collective identity and how geographical shifts carry enduring political meaning. She hopes to imagine new modes of memory and collective agency in the face of environmental crisis and enduring colonial infrastructures.
Born in Buenos Aires, Reznik holds a Diploma in Philosophy (Universidad de Buenos Aires) and co-founded Contemporary Arts Magazine CIA, directed by Roberto Jacoby. She studied at ArtScience Interfaculty, Royal Academy of Art, The Hague.