Wednesday | Oct 22 | 6pm
Screening @ Deluge
Tell Me Why
Ambiguities and interference patterns—nocturnal futures and wandering souls.
Watch Online Free: Thursday, Oct 23 (24hrs)
IT IS WANTING
Jennet Thomas | 2025 | UK | 11 min | Cdn Premiere
A defiant, weird, DIY lament on not keeping calm in toxic times. A 60-year-old woman (the filmmaker) confronts over consumption and AI-fuelled misogynistic ageism with deadpan slapstick, a sculptural costume and an intricate, animated collage of bar-codes. A frenetic performance of striped, coded beings enmeshed in a system that’s of their own making, yet out of their control. Ambiguities and interference patterns are embraced, as is the contradiction of the toxic and the sublime, the comic and apocalyptic. Originally conceived as a live performance, this is a collaboration with composer Matt Rogers and The Something Puffs.
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 1990’s, 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.
Flytipping Digital Waste
Jenny Dunseath, Christopher Churcher | 2024 | UK | 3 min | NA Premiere
Flytipping Digital Waste is a short film composed of nocturnal fly-tipping sites, sliced with computational intelligence and predictive technology. Driven by automation, advances in technology and the resulting ethical consequences, the film captures waste, simulates speculative waste, and simultaneously creates digital waste, as remnants of footage have been dumped across social media platforms. The film navigates everyday realism and speculative fiction against the backdrop of a prowling black car. The vehicle's headlights provide an unnerving act of surveillance. Illuminating quiet cul-de-sacs, dead-end roads and unwatched spaces, it identifies sites for finding or dumping waste. Stained mattresses, broken appliances and decomposing matter become markers of society. The protagonist car is indicative of industrial change with a complex environmental legacy and impact. Its future form is on the verge of becoming a hybrid/electric machine, with its fossil fuel form becoming redundant. As the film progresses, real footage is interspersed with speculative fiction created from edited AI imagery. The AI generated fly tipping imagery is formed from real world documentation. The local council’s Fly Tipping App now simultaneously serves as a repository for reporting fly-tipping, and as a source for generating AI fly tipping. Each image, an entry in an ever-growing digital archive of neglect. The soundtrack is an increasing mix of AI generated sound, taking over real time audio. The film’s structure nods to contemporary postproduction methods. AI imagery is regurgitated through editing processes akin to the alluring adverts that once promoted the now discarded items. Adverts, created from countless edited iterations for numerous broadcast formats and social media platforms, produce a mass of unused content, unseen versions, and data. All accumulating to create digital landfill.
From a shared background in film and sculpture, Churcher & Dunseath work together to explore the ambiguity of the digital and the tangible, examining how physical and computational processes overlap and transform. By combining real-world footage, physical processes, AI-generated imagery and post-production techniques, their work explores human agency in relation to the material, the immaterial and the machine-made. Churcher is an artist and post-production specialist at Time Based Arts, London UK contributing to major commercial and artistic projects, including Daughters (2023), Love Lies Bleeding (2024). Dunseath is Reader in Fine Art Sculpture at Bath Spa University, UK. Exhibitions include Korean Cultural Centre, CICA South Korea, Royal Academy of Art London, Barbican London and events at Tate Modern, UK.
Tell Me Why
Roger Deutsch | 2025 | Hungary, Cambodia, Germany, Hungary, Lao People's Democratic Republic, Netherlands, Peru, Romania, Thailand, Vietnam | 15 min | NA Premiere
Date: Monday, August 18, 2036: After the eruption of the Mt. Erasmus super volcano in Holland, most of western Europe has been rendered uninhabitable. I am one of the lucky ones who has been given the opportunity to race the lava to the Pacific ocean on the Daorklis 2, the only train still running to the far east.
Roger Deutsch has been writing, producing and directing experimental, documentary and narrative films for over 40 years. His films have been awarded at film festivals worldwide.
Dark Light
Gloria Chung | 2025 | USA | 12 min | Cdn Premiere
Regarding sound, etymologies, dead images and the Sun.
Dark Light: the dim cloud of light that is experienced in complete darkness, owing to the spontaneous activity of neurons in the visual system.
Gloria Chung lives and works in New York. Her films have been screened at festivals and galleries in the USA and internationally.
Learn More About Gloria Chung’s Work at Automat
Operation Wandering Soul ////////// Ghost Tape Number 10
Ryan Betschart, Rachel Nakawatase | 2025 | USA | 6 min | Cdn Premiere
At a seance, an American war vet upset over his daughter’s suicide is tricked by con artists who end up playing him a tape of his own war crimes, triggering him to take his life.
Ryan is co-director and head curator of San Diego Underground Film Festival (MovieMaker Magazine Top 50 Festivals Worth the Entry Fee), has programmed for Slamdance Film Festival, has taught Adjunct at CalArts and is currently a Lecturer at UC San Diego in the Cinematic Arts Program. His films have screened at Fantasia, Slamdance, Edinburgh International Film Festival, Ann Arbor, Porto Post/Doc, Hammer Museum, REDCAT, Desert Daze and have won awards at Slamdance, Athens International Film and Video Festival, Indie Memphis, Arizona Underground. His band Shrine Maiden’s album And I Arise was named one the Top 10 Experimental Albums of 2020 by Outtallectuals zine. Their fourth album is due out October 2025 on Whited Sepulchre Records. Ryan holds an MFA in Film/Video from California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) and a BA in Visual Art from UC San Diego.
Night Out with Ronnie
Kabir Mehta | 2025 | India | 20 min | Cdn Premiere
A 70-year-old ex-playboy aristocrat stumbles through memories and misfires in Goa, fantasizing a grand comeback amid the crumbling ruins of his ego. What begins as a comical portrait of vanity morphs into something darker and more poignant, an elegy for a life lived in denial and a hybrid excavation of performance, delusion and the ache of aging disgracefully.
Kabir Mehta is an Indian filmmaker whose independent work explores a boundary-blurring docu-fiction style. Fascinated by themes of masculinity, authorship and perception, his subjects often perform with an awareness of the camera, deliberately challenging our trust in what it captures. With films like BUDDHA.MOV and Sadhu in Bombay, Mehta crafts immersive, character-driven narratives that subvert traditional forms and offer fresh perspectives on contemporary Indian life. His films have screened at international festivals including Tallinn Black Nights, Slamdance, Ann Arbor, Chicago Underground, Winterthur, Kassel Dokfest, New Orleans, Mumbai and Dharamshala, and have also been released on MUBI. He’s also lent his sensibility to more commercial narratives and episodic series.
Wednesday | Oct 22 | 8pm
Screening @ Deluge
Remote Views
Analog ghosts and memories collaged and reconstituted for the digital age. The parable is the process, the anomaly is the archive.
Watch Online Free: Thursday, Oct 23 (24hrs)
Late August 1993
Seoungho Cho | 2024 | Korea/USA | 10 min | Cdn Premiere
Lyrical and visually striking, the video works of Korean artist Seoungho Cho are distinguished by a unique confluence of complex image processing and sound collage. Resonating with a highly metaphorical sensibility, Cho’s single-channel tapes and installations are formalist, almost painterly explorations of subjectivity and the subconscious. The natural and urban landscapes that Cho depicts often move with a continuous fluidity, shifting from dreamlike abstractions of light to fleeting reflections of objects and people. Figures and their environments are mirrored and diffused through one another, silhouetted with a haunting anonymity that is echoed in the poetic texts and soundscapes that accompany each piece. These often tense meditations focus on the nature and cost of isolation and loneliness while integrating into a culture, landscape and language other than one’s own. —Electronic Arts Intermix
Pictures of a negative chair
Magdalena Bermudez | 2025 | USA | 9 min | Cdn Premiere
An account of a scientist trying to teach machines how to infer depth from two-dimensional pictures. A parable of a prince trying to resurrect his lover by fashioning a chair out of his lover’s things. A question about the need for human beings, and the things they are in need of.
Magdalena Bermudez is a filmmaker and educator whose practice examines the entangled relations between humans, nonhuman animals 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 film festivals such as Ann Arbor Film Festival, Antimatter, Athens International Film + Video Festival, Mimesis Documentary Festival, Kasseler DokFest, İstanbul International Experimental Film Festival, Winnipeg Underground Film Festival, and Science New Wave Festival. She is an Assistant Professor of Cinema at Binghamton University.
Ghost Rider
Big Top Collective | 2025 | Germany/Canada | 3 min | World Premiere
Shot on 8mm Kodachrome film in West Berlin in 1988, this dream-like hallucinogenic film is dedicated to the memory of our friend, filmmaker and musician, Lysanne Thibodeau, who brought us to Germany to screen Canadian experimental films. We shot additional black and white Super 8 film in Victoria in 2023, and edited in 2024 at FLUX media gallery.
As the BIG TOP collective, Trace Nelson and Peter Sandmark have been making experimental films in collaboration since 2018, by combining found film footage and video, and transforming the imagery in digital post-production. We have worked with natural forms and garden imagery to create poetic visual imaginary landscapes. Trace has been making video art and installations since the 1980s and Peter has been creating experimental films since 1981, on 16mm film.
A Flame the Colour of Air
Emily Pelstring | 2025 | Canada | 8 min | W Cdn Premiere
Medieval Catholic mystic Hildegard von Bingen reconciles the virgin/whore dichotomy in a psychedelic, erotic vision. Hildegard was known for her waking visions of the divine, her musical compositions and her extensive medical encyclopedias. The animated imagery in this film is inspired by her surviving transcriptions, which suggest a departure from the mainstream views of her culture. In this speculative fictional tale, Hildegard has a vision in which erotic dancers appear to her as embodiments of the divine. The narration is strategically selected and collaged from Hildegard’s texts.
Emily Pelstring is an artist and filmmaker, and an Associate Professor in the Department of Film and Media at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. Her work across media installation, experimental film and performance situates the moving image and sound in relation to overlapping concepts drawn from science, magical traditions and religious texts. Her artistic inquiries bring together questions around the contingency of the cinematic spectacle: the interdependence of space, bodies, electricity, apparatus and cultural perceptions. Pelstring has exhibited internationally in museums, galleries, DIY spaces and festivals and along with her “sister-crones” Jessica Mensch and Katherine Kline is part of the trio The Powers.
The Announced Tragedy
Thanut Rujitanont | 2023 | Thailand/Australia/Belgium/Finland/Portugal | 10 min | Cdn Premiere
The Announced Tragedy uses animation production as a process of memory consolidation. The work can be seen as a personal memory extension that preserves the irrational and incomplete memories of the director towards the house where he grew up. The work recalls the space and time of these memories, ultimately overwriting, re-editing and re-materializing them in the form of animation. The work consists of four chapters, each enacts a specific memory the director had as a child in his house.
Thanut Rujitanont was born in Bangkok, Thailand. Currently, he is doing his PhD in animation at Griffith Film School in Brisbane, Australia. He graduated from RE:ANIMA European Joint Master in Animation from Finland, Belgium and Portugal in 2023. He holds a bachelor’s degree in film and digital media at KMITL in Bangkok, Thailand (2016}. He does animation as a laborious thinking process and a daily chore practice to contemplate the scattered fields of his interest.
Greyscale
Simon Payne | 2025 | UK | 3 min | Cdn Premiere
The rolling stripes that this piece begins with suggest a sense of depth from the outset, and evoke a seascape. Increasingly complex waveforms accrue as the stripes begin to separate out. The image plane is not just a surface phenomenon: we are drawn to see through it.
Simon Payne has been making experimental cinema works for over 20 years. His videos are predominantly orientated around bold graphic forms, primary and secondary colours and highly structured sequences that produce conflicting planes and unexpected effects. Sometimes there are contingent elements in his work that correspond with incidental indications of the artist’s hand. The systems that underpin his videos involve the entirety of the screen and every edge. Their effects spill out of the screen, to illuminate the spaces in which they are shown in remarkable ways. His work has been shown in numerous international film festivals, cinemas and art galleries including the Ann Arbor, Edinburgh, London and Rotterdam international film festivals: Anthology Film Archives, New York, the European Media Arts Festival, Pacific Film Archives, Media City and the Hermitage Museum. In the UK his work has shown at the Camden Arts Centre, Tate Britain and Tate Modern, the Serpentine Gallery and Whitechapel Gallery. Payne is Associate Professor in Film and Media at ARU, Cambridge, and lives in London.
Jordan Wept
Astria Suparak, Brett Kashmere | 2024 | USA/Canada | 9 min | Cdn Premiere
This video spotlights the range and utility of the long-running Crying Jordan meme, which re-immortalizes one of the 20th century’s most successful athletes (Michael Jordan) into an avatar of failure: an everyman for disappointment, angst and sorrow, a tool for rapid responses to live events and a demonstration of the increased power of (anonymous, decentralized) fan culture.
Astria Suparak’s cross-disciplinary projects address complex and urgent issues (like institutionalized racism and colonialism) made accessible through a popular culture lens, such as science fiction movies, rock music and sports.
Brett Kashmere’s creative and scholarly practice reframes dominant narratives about sports and illuminates new perspectives and histories. Previous film, new media, textile, installation and writing projects explored the sociocultural history of basketball and its merger with hip hop, the disconnect between Canadian self-image and hockey violence, traditions of athlete activism and counter-hegemonic sports films and art.
Both Suparak and Kashmere are artists and curators in Oakland, California.
Remote Views
Alexis McCrimmon | 2025 | USA | 15 min | Cdn Premiere
A televisual stream of consciousness assembled from archival footage set in the Black media explosion of the 1980s. A frenetic remix of public access television, video diaries, commercial mass media and citizen journalism sequenced as short vignettes featuring musical and poetic performance, documentation of state violence, political theatre and expressions of Black love.
Alexis McCrimmon is a filmmaker and moving-image editor based in the Midwestern United States. Her non-fiction and experimental films explore geographies of power, hauntological subjects and the linkages between material culture and ritual practice.