Wednesday | Oct 23 | 6pm
Screening @ Deluge
The Concrete River
Watch Online Free: Thursday, Oct 24 (24hrs)
Auf der hohen See, Teil 1: Vom aufkeimenden Entschluss wohl oder übel eine Reise antreten zu müssen
Ralf Petersen | 2024 | Austria | 10 min | NA Premiere
A found-footage work, consisting of flickering film remnants on 35mm, 16mm and 8mm, coloured and maltreated, set to ominous music that tilts from atonal to electronic—Krautrock, noise and free jazz—united by a voyage on the sea.
Ralf Petersen is an author, filmmaker and artist. Originally from Germany, he lives in Upper Austria.
Bouscueil
Thomy Laporte | 2023 | Canada | 10 min | W Cdn Premiere
Bouscueil: Quebec word describing the chaotic piling up of ice floes from the effect of wind, tides or currents.
Thomy Laporte lives and works in Rimouski, Quebec. As an independent filmmaker, he embraces a diversity of views and styles. Imbued with a singular rigour, his work is remarkable for the accuracy and sensitivity of his gaze on human nature.
Why is water so heavy? vol i, time never changed water
Ghislan Sutherland-Timm | 2023 | Canada | 3 min | W Cdn Premiere
In part of an ongoing autobiographical-fictional collection entitled Why is water so heavy? (2022–present), interlocking the fluidity and borderless nature of water in relation to diaspora and landmarking. I dwell on self-ambiguity as time continues to spatialize fragments of my ancestral histories and cultural practices lost in water.
Ghislan Sutherland-Timm is a multidisciplinary craftsman and amateur media archivist based in Tkaronto/Toronto. As part of the queer Black Canadian diaspora, their artistic practice is influenced by their ancestral ties and reconnection to their Afro-Vincentian heritage and Carib (Island Carib/Kalinago) roots. In this process of activation, they seek to merge their identities alongside their English and Scottish (Clan Sutherland) ancestry in understanding fragmentations of their multicultural identity hosted within embodying living entities, memories and land formations. Their work is also ignited by the ephemerality and tactility of sound and film. In creating "incomplete complete" works, collage-making across diverse mediums is frequently utilized within their practice to shape autobiographical-fictional narratives and subjects of ambiguous beings. Through this intersection Sutherland-Timm navigates unravelling the mythologies and romanticization of home and homecoming.
Turbulenzen im Kanal [Turbulence in a Channel]
Gregor Eldarb | 2023 | Austria | 12 min | NA Premiere
Turbulence in a Channel is inspired by Friedrich Ahlborn’s (1858–1937) research on currents, but also by techniques of photographic imaging of water surfaces or lines of force.
Gregor Eldarb grew up in Sweden, and lives and works in Vienna. He studied painting and graphic arts at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. Eldarb has been widely exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in Austria and abroad. Screenings of his moving image work include Maudit Film Festival, Festival du Nouveau Cinéma Montreal, Architecture Film Festival Brussels, IndieLisboa International Film Festival and Ann Arbor Film Festival.
Rain
Mike Hoolboom | 2024 | Canada | 5 min | Cdn Premiere
How to step into a new kind of Jerusalem without becoming what we feared? How to leave behind every notion of the chosen few, and embrace the ones along the way, finding a promised land in each other. Based on an excerpt from the poem “Red Sea: April 2002” by Aurora Levins Morales, a disabled Puerto Rican Jewish writer and activist.
Mike Hoolboom began making movies in 1980. Making as practice, a daily application. Ongoing remixology. 100+ movies, 100 fest awards. Feature-length bio docs, then ongoing series about capitalism. The animating question of community: how can I help you? Interviews with media artists for three decades. 30+ books, written, edited, co-edited. Local ecologies. Volunteerism. Opening the door.
The Concrete River
Nora Sweeney | 2023 | USA | 15 min | W Cdn Premiere
An exploration of how different communities spend time along the Los Angeles River, a 51-mile waterway largely channelized with concrete that cuts through various neighbourhoods of Greater Los Angeles. While people fish, skateboard, paint, play music, have quiet moments to engage with the landscape or carve out a place to live by the banks, egrets and herons roost in trees growing in the middle of the river. I was drawn to the river as an unregulated public space where people converge with each other and nature, finding respite from the city.
Nora Sweeney, a Los Angeles-based documentary filmmaker, artist and professor focuses her work on cultural traditions, labour, communities and public spaces. As the grandchild of Jewish and Assyrian immigrants, she has grown up with a deep appreciation of food, cultural heritage and community. Born and raised in Cincinnati, Ohio, she received her BA, majoring in art, from Oberlin College and MFA in Film/Video from CalArts. She taught documentary filmmaking and photography for two years at a women's college in India through an Oberlin fellowship, and currently teaches at Pierce College. In 2022, she was a Nature Art Habitat Residency Fellow in Sottochiesa, Italy. Her work has screened at Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival, the Edinburgh International Film Festival, REDCAT, Antimatter and the Milwaukee Underground Film Festival.
Wednesday | Oct 23 | 8pm
Screening @ Deluge
I Speak the Night
In-Person Screening: I Speak the Night
Student/Older Adult $6 (use code 25OFF at checkout)
Watch Online Free: Thursday, Oct 24 (24hrs)
Parallel Botany
Magdalena Bermudez | 2023 | USA | 11 min | Cdn Premiere
Still lives of real fruit meet botanical illustrations of plant galls to expose the paradox of dissection: each time we cut something in two, we merely create a new exterior.
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 merits.
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 [Media Art], 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.
Hunky Dory
Steven Vander Meer | 2024 | USA | 6 min | Cdn Premiere
Hunky Dory juxtaposes scenes of animal life with images of human existence, observing the quirky and unexpected ways in which we are similar. The meticulously hand-drawn animation is a visual smorgasbord, moving and morphing in perfect time to the banjo music of Béla Fleck and his bandmates in My Bluegrass Heart.
Northern California-based artist Steven Vander Meer creates animated films by drawing on 3x5” index cards. He has a BA from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, but is primarily self-taught as an animator. His award winning films have screened at Sundance, Ann Arbor, Slamdance, Annecy, Raindance, Cinequest and many other festivals, as well as the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the DeYoung Museum in San Francisco.
July Twenty-seventh, Tour of Suzhou Gardens
Getong Wang | 2024 | China/USA | 8 min | World Premiere
As one wanders through the garden on a leisure tour, they find what has been lost in the mists of light and shadow. July Twenty-seventh, Tour of Suzhou Gardens offers a personal path from the aesthetics of experimental cinema to a conversation within Chinese poetic tradition.
Getong Wang is an MFA student in Film and Video Production at the University of Iowa. He creates works that derive from his interests in experimental film, poetry and music. They often touch upon subjects like the Asian American diaspora, Chinese classical poetry, space in relation to memory and the ambiguity and fallout between fantasy and reality.
Arbor Labor
Stefanie Weberhofer | 2024 | Austria | 7 min | NA Premiere
Arbor Labor is an encounter of the cinema audience with the forest. The vibrant and tactile realm made sensually perceptible with puristic filmic means. This cinematic journey combines in-camera footage with rayograms, where the forest is directly transferred onto the film material. The result is a complex collage that skillfully forms a connection between traditional structural filmmaking and the urgent issue of the current climate crisis.
Stefanie Weberhofer is dedicated to independent avant garde cinema. She is a director, cinematographer, editor and producer of her own films. Her works are created on Super 8, 16mm or 35mm film, often self-developed in the darkroom, and are presented in cinema, exhibition contexts and through live performances.
Photosynthesis
Brian Zahm | 2023 | USA | 7 min | Cdn Premiere
Enter a mysterious void to witness the miracle of life via a 1960s perceptual art-inspired experience.
Brian Zahm is an award-winning interdisciplinary artist whose work has been exhibited worldwide. Riding the analog-to-digital wave for three decades, he works in narrative, documentary and experimental filmmaking, and performs/produces electronic music. He currently teaches Film Production (specializing in experimental filmmaking) at DePaul University School of Cinematic Arts in Chicago.
I speak the night
Doris Schmid | 2023 | Germany/ItalySwitzerland | 19 min | Cdn Premiere
The work begins and ends with a shot of a snowy mountain under a full moon, which renders it into a glowing majestic mountain. As starting and as end point, this image symbolically represents the concerns and leitmotif of I speak the night: a cyanotype reflection on perception, imagination and on artistic expression of the collective real, external world, in relation to the subjective inner life of each individual.
Doris Schmid, born in Switzerland, is a visual artist in the fields of video, installation and photography. She studied painting and video/new media in Basel and Zurich. Since 2000 she has conceived numerous exhibitions, art projects, screenings, projects with musicians/performers and participated in video festivals. The artist lived in Vienna from 2002 to 2012 and has since been based in Berlin.