Experimental

  • Return to You

    A pair of lovers are separated by a war that is taking place just 4km from their home.  The young woman, strained by isolation, finally has her fiancé return home, but he is bleeding from fatal gunshot wounds.  As his breathing fades, the young woman decides to join her love in death by poisoning herself.

    Biogrpahy

    Born in Calgary, Alberta, Cam Woykin graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Lethbridge in 2003. He has since completed numerous short films, screening his work throughout Canada and internationally. Woykin currently resides in Toronto, where he is completing his Master’s of Fine Arts in film production at York University.
  • yaya/ayat

    yaya/ayat explores identities, being lost in translation and distance. But at its core it’s about Shimby longing for a relationship with her geographically distant grandma and her journey to Greece to find her. This is an experimental documentary about how being a part of any diaspora shapes a person’s identity.

    Biography

    Shimby Zegeye-Gebrehiwot was the first in her family to be born and raised in Winnipeg, Canada. In February 2010 she went to Greece to be with and film her maternal grandmother. The result of this trip was the experimental documentary yaya/ayat, which is her first film.
  • Black Chalk
    A group of uniformed students receive tutelage while a presence moves around and through them.
  • ZOOROOKS

    The rooks in the Assiniboine Park Zoo photographed frame by frame from the exterior of their enclosure. Their intense social behavior creates a flurry within the frame, which dissipates in a final shot - of a broad park landscape in Neuhardenberg Germany.

    The bulk of this film was shot using old stock and a hand-wind camera donated by John Nesbitt and won in a Winnipeg Film Group draw. ZOOROOKS was created in admiration of Bruce Baille's All My Life.
  • Kick Shutter

    This film performance introduces a second shutter to the projection, which is controlled by a mechanism attached to my kick drum. This kick mechanism interrupts the projector's beam in time to the drum's hit. Kick Shutter aims to abstract the carefully edited outs of a vintage winter coat commercial into a stream of formal elements. The performance leans towards a senseless and sublime ritual.

    (projection with live sound by Aston Coles & Irene Bindi*, featuring a second shutter to the projector connected to a kick pedal)

    *The sound on this digital version is provided by the handmade instruments & amplification devices of Deaf Squab: Aston Coles, Irene Bindi, Celia Coles, Martin Finkenzeller.
  • Warchild

    Warchild is part of a trilogy of experimental documentaries done on students from South East Collegiate, a boarding school in Winnipeg for Aboriginal youth coming from Northern Manitoba.

    Recalling the esthetic of traditional Japanese cinema this short film portrays a young solitary figure seeking his place in society. His journey from the North to the city encapsulates his struggle to become a responsible adult and seek serenity.

    Biography

    Caroline Monnet (Algonquin/French), born in Ottawa, Canada, is a self-taught award winning filmmaker and artist. She completed a B.A in Communication and Sociology at the University of Ottawa and Granada, Spain. She uses video, photography, and installation to explore the dualities of her social, political, and spiritual identity, developing a critical framework influenced by history, community, and unconventional memory. Monnet’s work has been exhibited across Europe, Canada and the US. She is currently based in Winnipeg where she is an active member of ITWÉ, a trans-disciplinary collective dedicated to research, creation, production and education in the field of Aboriginal digital culture. 
  • fish in barrel
    A live action experimental drama focused on a young man's psychological struggle that combines elements of sculpture, photography, and video to slow time and visually explore the idea of internal conflict. This struggle erupts into visions that question what lies below the surface and is extended into an underwater environment that can be seen as nurturing, dangerous, inhospitable, safe, or distant.
  • Machine with Wishbone
    Featuring the artwork of internationally celebrated artist Arthur Ganson this remarkable journey follows a stoic, determined wishbone on its explorative journey through an imaginative miniature world of snoring beds, paper birds, clouds that come in a box, and delightfully bewitching landscapes.
  • Point de mémoire: les sports d'hiver
    Point de mémoire: les sports d'hiver is a mixed-media installation that seeks to investigate technology's effect on the active process of making history.  Jacquelyn explores this through a juxtaposition of reconfigured found footage from the 1930's and newly created Super 8 films that were inspired by those archival images.  These non-linear short narratives are synchronized and edited in such a way that the stories respond to each other and are intended to be projected onto opposite-facing handmade screens.  Both films are united by a single overarching soundtrack created from ambient audio gathered while shooting in Manitoba. Point de mémoire explores the spirit of nostalgia, playfulness, and the “re-creation" of memory and was recently shown at La maison des artistes visuels francophones (MAVF) from Nov. 2009 to Jan. 2010.
  • Dead Ringer

    Shot in 3DIY. A tsunami of magnetic rays disrupts the primitive cell-phone broadcast of a Horseshoe Match. The Moral: Never mount a satellite dish on your microwave!
  • The Stranger
    A cinematic poem about dreams and realities, The Strangers is an experimental film that depicts one man’s metaphoric melt down after a brief romantic encounter.
  • IKWÉ

    The re-imagination of the generational passage of traditional knowledge between a woman and her grandmother moon.

    IKWÉ is an experimental film that weaves the narrative of one woman’s (IKWÉ) intimate thoughts with the teachings of her grandmother, the Moon, creating a surreal narrative experience that communicates the power of thoughts and personal reflection.

    Biography

    Caroline Monnet (Algonquin/French), born in Ottawa, Canada, is a self-taught award winning filmmaker and artist. She completed a B.A in Communication and Sociology at the University of Ottawa and Granada, Spain. She uses video, photography, and installation to explore the dualities of her social, political, and spiritual identity, developing a critical framework influenced by history, community, and unconventional memory. Monnet’s work has been exhibited across Europe, Canada and the US. She is currently based in Winnipeg where she is an active member of ITWÉ, a trans-disciplinary collective dedicated to research, creation, production and education in the field of Aboriginal digital culture. 
  • La Revue
    Art forms have been killing each other off for centuries. In an artistic autopsy, Aiken and Majzels examine the death of vaudeville. Through dance, performance and music, this film uses the trappings of vaudeville to tell the story of its demise. With a cabaret of sad double acts, aging burlesque dancers and tired magicians, the film takes a humorous and macabre look into the forgotten arts.
  • La Revue
    Art forms have been killing each other off for centuries. In an artistic autopsy, Aiken and Majzels examine the death of vaudeville. Through dance, performance and music, this film uses the trappings of vaudeville to tell the story of its demise. With a cabaret of sad double acts, aging burlesque dancers and tired magicians, the film takes a humorous and macabre look into the forgotten arts.
  • Fabric
    Fabric is an experimental narrative about a woman's attempts to reconnect with her family. The film uses magical realism to visualize a physical process of grief, exploring both real and imagined spaces.
  • Robert's Walk
    An adaptation of an adaptation. After failing to complete a long format film adapted from a short prose poem by Robert Walser, Eskin and Gerson found themselves with a vestige of a story. Working backwards they adapted the footage from their incomplete film into a film poem that examines the eccentricity of Walser and his lifelong dialogue with the natural world.
  • win'e-peg' sin'e-me-tek'
  • Arm Wrestling Bear Movie
  • Basillica
    A visual essay on the stately St. Boniface Basillica.
  • Getting Warmer
  • The Creation
  • Fictional Biography - a.k.a. film(dzama)
    Fictional Biography is a short experimental film documenting "a day in the life" of the great Canadian Visual Arts, Manuel Dzyma (great grandfather of Marcel Dzama). Through a surreal narrative we are shown a tormented artist whose "artist block" has invaded his rational mind.
  • Basilica
    A visual essay on the stately St. Boniface Basillica.
  • Argentina
    The dispassionate calm of a solitary man is captured with disturbing clarity. The sound and images of Argentina mirror the stoic calm of this lone man.
  • Sitka
    Sitka ("net" in Ukrainian) is composed of threads and ruptures into the folds of memory, love, and loss. Body, skin, touch, movement, man and woman, mother and son, memories are awash in a haptic eroticism of film grain. With use of overexposure, vaseline, hand-processing, and flashes of light, this film asks for a close, haptic viewing.
  • Harmaline
    Harmaline refers to a chemical compound present in the shamanistic snuff mixture ayahuasca used throughout areas of South America. The video loosely references the psychological effects of the compound harmaline as well as traditions associated with religious use of hallucinogens.
  • Baggage

    What percentage of Americans pretend to be Canadian while traveling abroad?
  • two minus one
    A man and a woman. Then just a man after a woman.
  • untitled1 (prayerielandscape)
    Isolated dreams of broken cars falling through the horizon...
  • Carousel
    What you are about to witness is a fear seeded from the sleepless nights of children. The still, dark night consumes what is safe about your bedroom. In a moonlight room, the shadows in the faces of toys can reflect the macabre. Adulthood shatters the notion that inanimate objects can attain life when you are not looking.  But what if, one night, you wake to the tune of a carousel as it turns without your influence. There is no one else in the room. Get ready for an intimate experience with unnatural forces.
  • The Sex of Self-Hatred
    It’s 1903, and Otto Wieninger, Vienna’s most infamous self-hating Jew, has decided to kill himself in a room containing Beethoven’s deathbed. He has just published his first book Sex and Character, and has yet to witness an acknowledgment of his self-assured genius. Haunted by the damning statements within his own book, he holds a gun to his head, and takes a leap towards the great unknown.
  • Suitcases for the Invisible
    Suitcases for the Invisible is a six part piece about melancholy without the cheesy balls for its conundrums - it is about despair with or without an ironic sympathy for a "Sugarcube" - like voice-off which does not take herself seriously. In other words, the voice is constantly saying why be sad?; I am so sad....The six piece splash of vignettes is a of stagnette imagination about enuii.
  • Wait
    Wait is about the constant interchange and the exchange in human interactions that leads to a sort of sisyphussian / icarussian jump towards and away from love.
  • The Falling Man
    The Falling Man is a mostly black and white computer animation about suicide, travel, and  windows. It is based upon many Edward Hopper paintings. In honour of "Rumblefish", there is  also one orange fish in the film, set against the monochromatic colour scheme.
  • Salome's Gift
    A one man war epic.   A look into the mind of a soldier...  one man's army.
  • Killing Time (St. James Still Life Project)
    Regression and nostalgia necessitate a recapturing of a lost time killed in the fleeting ignorance of youth. This piece recaptures the dead time of suburban youth by exploring and the radical potential of new sense of pseudo-cinematic realism offered by video. Everything happens/nothing is happening.
  • The Snow Queen
    When the real world turns sour, ten-year old Talia finds shelter in a fantasy world of ice and snow. But as life becomes more and more difficult, Talia's daydreams become less protective and more menacing.
  • Threefold

    Three stories, three colours, three stages in a woman’s life. In this lush and ethereal short film, tales from classical mythology are turned upside-down to celebrate three powerful women.  These ancient world ‘bad girls’ were punished for their curiosity, sexuality and knowledge, but in this film they are rewarded for their desire to understand and actively participate in the world around them. Expect the unexpected in Threefold.
  • Asleep at the Wheel
    Using found footage of road trips from the 60's, Maryniuk has crafted a psychedelic tribute piece to a friend who passed away in a car accident.  Maryniuk's techniques included hole punching and reassembling, bleaching, painting, scratch animation and boiling the film.
  • Direction
    Direction is an experimental documentary that explores the parallel between physical and spiritual directions.  Both film and video are used to reach the desired visual effect.  Video projections are shown through glass and water which is then refracted onto a screen where it is shot using 16mm film.  The result both captivating and restful as the light creates many different shapes which is then mixed with the grain of film.  Descriptions of physical directions and tellings of experiences with God are spoken from many different characters throughout the piece.  Ambient sound created by Mike Germain is subtle yet effective in assisting with the mood of the piece.  Thematically Direction deals with a personal desire to feel at home, whether it is on the physical or metaphysical level.
  • rifting/blue
    This film explores women and madness. It is devoted to breakages- to what they look like, what they feel like, and who those humans are who have been asked to hold them –in their pieces, as they disintegrate.

    Through superimpositions and dissolves, and mixing formats of 16mm, stills and video, the film constructs, in cinematic collage, the “push/pull of appearance as expression and concealment” that madness is. The highly coded yet emotionally naked images become the multi-layered capacity to endure watching-that is the film.
  • Bahlay Kehlay
    Bahlay Kehlay is the result of a backpacking trip through West Africa with a Bolex camera.  In sub-Sahara Africa especially, traditional hand drumming and dancing is deeply embedded within the many cultures of the region. These rhythms are not restricted to just music.  In West Africa rhythm manages to permeate through all of the population into all aspects of daily life. The title comes from a traditional song that originates in the northern region of Ghana.  The hand drumming is an interpretation of a traditional rhythm also from northern Ghana.
  • Hope
    a haven

    a desire of some good, accompanied with an expectation of obtaining it

    one who, or that which, gives hope, furnishes ground of expectation, or promises desired good
  • untitled3 (stone killer)
    The colonial division between landscape and body has been rejected, and the politics of a new topology, one concerning a failed geometry imposed onto Canada’s Great Plains has emerged. This film is a Portrait that has been sketched into an infinite horizon, where a body becomes one with the landscapes it has fallen into.
  • Protection
    Two sisters, Snow White and Rose Red, face an unforgiving and alienating modern world. How do they find protection when the world is designed to tear them apart?
  • Ming So
    A short, experimental film documenting spirits walking in Winnipeg’s downtown back alleys.
  • Panic Attack
    An interpretation of the internal struggle of anxiety.
  • Robert's Walk
    An adaptation of an adaptation. After failing to complete a long format film adapted from a short prose poem by Robert Walser, Eskin and Gerson found themselves with a vestige of a story. Working backwards they adapted the footage from their incomplete film into a film poem that examines the eccentricity of Walser and his lifelong dialogue with the natural world.
  • Inland
    Two lovers, a beach, a little girl and the secret that pulls them apart.
  • Winged Victory
    Step right up Ladies and Gentlemen, Step right up! Presenting Winged Victory, an over-the-Big-Top experimental, silent-era-styled, hand-processed, scratch animation. Set in a Circus Ring, a Chicken Lady dreams of being the main stage flying trapeze act.  Constantly taunted and teased by scratch-animated clowns and a whip-wielding Ringmaster, there is only one way for her to achieve victory…a death defying act.
  • une femme n'est pas une île
    A musical exploration of the pain of unrequited love. A young woman sings of her struggle with her in-obedient heart.
  • Dog Face
    A short experimental film about a woman trapped in hell, where it is 7:30 am all the time. 
  • TOURISMTORONTO (A Hay Seed in Hogtown)
    TOURISMTORONTO is a Super 8 one take experiment shot with the intentions of generating audio from the film by capturing geometric imagery (shot frame by frame) and lights utilizing a long exposure.
  • Fish Arms
    Fish Arms have fish forearms
    Fish Arms are really, really strong,
    Fish Arms really tip the scales
    Fish Arms are strong like 50 whales
  • Chroma-dance

    Chroma-dance is a short abstract film that is an experiment in colour rhythm and movement, referencing both the visual music and materialist/conceptualist traditions in avant-garde filmmaking.

    This film consists of thirty filmed images of found colour and simple colour patterns that are assembled into a two dimensional array of five groups of six images. These images are then subjected to permutations of the order within each group (i.e: 123456 becomes 234561) and the order of the groups. These permutations of the images can be compared to a theme and transformations schema in tonal music or to the procedures of serialist atonal music or to the conceptualist chance – operation methods of John Cage.

  • Isolating Landscapes
    Isolating Landscapes is a short experimental film which includes found footage of landscapes, sailboats, and people washing in water. A series of ice heart moulds are shot over time showing a slow melt. Thematically, the work seeks to describe detachment and loneliness. The piece uses multiple film techniques such as hand manipulation of found footage, reticulation and hand processing of colour super 8 and 16mm film.
  • A Girl on the 22nd Floor Dreams of a Circus
    A Girl on the 22nd Floor longs for fresh air in a city that does not allow itself to think of real urbanity. A girl, high above the city, has dreams that take her far away from the place she is.  This short film is part of a triptych. The other 2 films are loving vertigo and colour me.
  • Odin's Sheild Maiden

    The shield maiden of Gimli yearns for the drowned fisherman Mundi while her acolytes in mourning aid her in this fact-based account of a tragic accident.

    O, celibate ocean

    Wet with death

    Do not grieve
  • Trafiiiiik
    An abstract designed film that started as an experiment. Made by applying ‘border tape’ (a long obsolete product used by graphic and production artists to make borders for ads) directly to clear 16mm film stock to see how the various patterns would synchronize with the frame rate and with one another.
  • Patience
    A silent musical with accordion accompaniment about the times when there is nothing one can do.

  • The Remedy (kinema cura)
    Inspired by the Winnipeg Film Group's silent film revival, "The Remedy" is a stylized tragicomedy about idealism, loss and convalescence. Chloe is a student and radical whose vision of her own bohemian utopia is shattered by the sudden death of her ex-lover, the incorrigible Leech-boy. The Lovely Morris tries to console Chloe in his own peculiar way, but what ultimately pulls Chloe out of her grief remains--like the essence of beauty and hope--a mystery. “The Remedy” is a languid visual tonic for the broken-hearted...
  • Fugue Nefesh
    A survivor of the Holocaust and an impoverished aboriginal boy have just died. United in their displacement, they become caught up in the flux of transmigration. A nomadic fugue, they wander timelessly among the naked souls of Winnipeg's desolate North End.
  • Tattoo Step
    Temporary Tattoos applied to 35mm for eternity. An energetic conjuring of Manitoban spirits. Starring: Haunted HyperActive Hypnotists and Breakneck Butterfly Barfbags.
  • 412222

    A dialogue on the division of time, space and light with reference to the figure in a multi-dimensional landscape.

    Dimensional movements of sound and surface come together in this collection of 14 short experiments on the division of space and light on 16mm film. A dialogue within the speed of triggering patterns arise as the viewer becomes the figure with their mind going for a walk in a multi-dimensional landscape. 

  • Discovering Composition in Art

    "By using some of these guides we can create exciting art from the world around us."

    Discovering Composition in Art uses found footage as source material for various darkroom experiments. These failed attempts to capture "good composition" race before the viewers' eyes like flashing lights. "By using some of these guides we can create exciting art from the world around us."
  • Hydro-Lévesque

    November, 1976. As Québec strides boldly towards independence, a supernatural vision of tragedy inspires a deaf-mute Québécoise Catholic nun to save the city of Winnipeg from committing mass suicide. Arriving just in time to find Winnipeg’s polio-stricken mayor leading the citizens into self-destructive hysteria, the Holy Sister must prepare the way to salvation by filling the city’s troubled heart with the radiant electricity of Québec sovereigntist leader, René Lévesque.

    Mixing historical iconographies with abstract surrealism, Hydro-Lévesque is a message of incandescent Québec nationalist love, wafting across Winnipeg’s denigrated icefields in smoke. Winner of the 2008 Special Jury Prize at the WNDX Festival of Film & Video Art and Festival De Cinéma Des Trois Amériques, Hydro-Lévesque’s startling formalism was created by manipulating the celluloid emulsion with Berg toners, Javex bleach, spray paint, a hole-puncher, burning cigarettes and human urine.
  • My Life in Dreams
    In the depths of sleep, a man eludes shadows and time as he explores the recesses of his subconscious. Struck by the hypnotic melody of the sea, a vision of an unfamiliar love leads him to rapture, and into the dark waters of uncertainty.  Shot on 16mm, Super8 and miniDV, My Life in Dreams follows a man’s trance-like recollection of a reoccurring dream he has had since childhood. Of, and through the subject’s eye, surreal black and white images are woven throughout the man’s narration as he moves through states of consciousness, memory and observation.
  • She Said...
    Humour, sarcasm, visual metaphors, animation and the naive perspective of one man are the framework for this portrait of a relationship sinking out of control, to no one’s amazement but those within it.
  • Revival

    Revival is a short 16mm experimental film about isolation, risk and rescue.

    Revival is a short 16mm experimental film about isolation, risk and rescue. The film is derived from super 8 films I found while thrift store shopping in Montréal. Watching them I was most drawn to the images of helicopters and the barren landscapes. I reprinted the imagery using various darkroom techniques and hand processed the results. Throughout the process I found myself surprised with the results time and time again, which motivated me to experiment even further. Revival is the first film where I took creative control over the audio as well, and had great fun exploring in this new realm.
  • Dream
    When desire becomes its own reality an abyss opens beneath us. Entranced by the illusion of want reality collapses and we awaken in the dreams of our own desperation. Dream was shot using a pinhole lens on a 16mm camera in an attempt to discover if the physicality of emotion could effectively be communicated via film.
  • How To Be An Experimental Filmmaker
    Even you can be an unappreciated, unpaid experimental filmmaker, so long as you are a white middle class boy and you pay very close attention to the instructions within this video.
  • Professor Delusia the Nocturnalist

    Has time left Professor Delusia behind, or when the curtain opens, will he reveal another forgotten trick of begotten times? The crumbling film leaves only hints of evidence to the source of this magic.

    Gerald Saul’s love of old film approaches is demonstrated here in this homage to George Melies and to the Surrealists. Saul plays the title character in this series of short acts of magic where film tricks are used to confound the unseen audience. The film combines digital and cinema approaches to create a sense of authenticity and wonder.
  • The Devil Wears a Paper Hat
    An imaginative young girl is pursued by a paper-clad gunslinger through a wintery world inhabited by living paper-birds and a moving, mysterious tree-man.
  • Basillica
    A visual essay on the stately St. Boniface Basillica.
  • Afternoon

    A woman’s struggle and fight with the demons in her head come to play with tormentor.

  • January
    January seeks to capture the essence of winter via an experimental/intuitive perspective.
    Much of this piece was shot without my looking threw the viewfinder utilizing a frame by frame exposure to build a landscape with snow banks, icy sidewalks and various tire tracks and trees along a Winnipeg walking trail. A process oriented work, january, carried with it the intention of generating audio with the digitized film, a dynamic drone that sits beneath the audio track from start to finish. The use of negative space illustrates the importance of what is there as much as what is not there, the dimension of dream, or the space between the space.
  • The Great Divide
    The Great Divide was created for collaboration with Japanese artist Katsuyuki Hattori which was performed live as part of a video concert.
    The work is composed of video footage of the Arlington Bridge which sprawls over the often debated train yard and grain transportation depot which segregates the North End of Winnipeg to the inner city.
    This work, Besant’s first attempt at generating audio from video, was inspired by the geometric form of the bridge and essentially this work has become something of a tutorial on the sounds generated by contrast and movement, and yet the overall feel of the piece seems to reflect the uncertainty of the politics and disjointed debate to move the train yard out if the city.
  • Time Away
    Three guides accompany us on a road trip away from time... and towards the transformative end of the road, space...
  • Home Body
    A dream about falling through ice inspires a woman`s search for home, only to find it in her own body.
  • Death By Popcorn: The Tragedy of the Winnipeg Jets
    Peppered with action-packed cameos by Winnipeg All-Stars Dale Hawerchuk, Burton Cummings, Teemu Selanne, Billy Van and a recent interview with the man who sent the Jets straight into the jaws of death by throwing a cataclysmic box of popcorn onto the ice in Game 6 of the 1990 playoff series, Death by Popcorn follows the ill-fated Jets through their many travails with arch-enemies Wayne Gretzky and the Edmonton Oilers, soul-crushing NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman and many other agents of Winnipeg annihilation. Sadness on ice.
  • Kubasa in a Glass
  • Drawing Genesis

    Drawing Genesis is a saturated visual compendium, which traces C. Graham Asmundson's performative gestures and visual residue. With the use of time lapse, still frames, lens obstruction, occult symbolism, subliminal imagery and blatant queer references the film presents a ritual of artistic inspiration that invokes man's primal forces.

    The soundtrack was created by converting a photograph of one of the paintings to a MIDI music file. This was subsequently entered into various synthesizers and sound programs and ultimately performed live by electronic artist, Cake Builder, adding a lush sound sigil to the frenetic magical imagery.

    This film was created during the One Take Super 8 Event at the first annual WNDX Festival of Avant Garde & Underground Film.
  • Dead Mothers Kitchen Floors
    A woman deals with the death of her mother through self-annihilating tendencies.
  • In Reflection
    The light, it was always up above me.... In Reflection is a memory prose poem on moving picture, shot on S8 and in one take.
  • What Comes Between
    What Comes Between is an examination of personal memory and loss rooted in the filmmaker's birthplace – Chile – and her departure from that country long ago. The work is a collage film created with found footage from personal and historic sources, and original hand printed and tinted footage.
  • I Have Lived
    I have lived is an experimental video captured from a wireless camera that was imbedded into the centre of a stethoscope. Moving images and emotions are captured as the doctor delivers news of new life to tragedy as the doctor goes about his day in a busy medical clinic. i have lived offers the viewer insight to the fragile and delicate doctor/patient relationship from the POV of an unlikely, unique inanimate object. With a soundtrack by the talented Winnipeg duo The Absent Sound.
  • She Drifts

    A woman contemplates an unusual dilemma as she drifts. Shot on Super 8 film, She Drifts examines the borders of a difficult choice. 

  • Photograph
    A four part series exploring a photographer and the soundscape she inhabits. Shot in sequence on super 8.
  • Surfacing
    An experiment dance piece investigating the concept of surface. Shot in London, England. In camera editing.
  • Cattle Call
    Cattle Call is a high-speed animated documentary about the art of livestock auctioneering. Structured around the mesmerizing talents of 2007 Manitoba /Saskatchewan Auctioneer Champion, Tim Dowler, and using a variety of classic and avant-garde animation techniques (including stop-motion, cut-outs, open-exposures, hole-punching and rubbing lettraset directly on the celluloid) filmmakers Maryniuk and Rankin have tried to create images as dazzlingly abstract, absurd and adrenalizing as the incredible language of auctioneering itself. It is their hope that the film will induce near-bovine levels of dumbfoundedness in all those who gaze upon it.
  • Imprint
    The transient connection of two, leaves a lingering memory on one. Imprint is a hand-crafted film, with many sections processed, printed and coloured by hand.
  • 00
    A young husband and wife carry on with a love muted by chemical dependency, mental debilitation and isolation.
  • A Quiet Moment with Richard
    A Quiet Moment with Richard spends a peaceful, nocturnal drive with Richard Kellie, writer, filmmaker, and taxi cab driver. Richard recounts an intense evening in Amsterdam while driving the vacant streets of Winnipeg.
  • Apraxia
    aprax-ia \(‘)a-’prak-se- \n [NL, fr. Gk, inaction, fr. a-+ praxis action, fr. prassein to do -- more at PRACTICAL] : loss or impairment of the ability to execute complex coordinated movements - aprac-tic \-’prak-tik\ or apraxic \-’prak-sik\ adj.
  • auto disintegrate
    Dora walks alone through an impersonal city that moves to the beat of traffic lights and the ring of isolating cell phones. A flirtation with death results in a campy musical dream where perfect strangers offer advice to reconnect with a personal reality.
  • Blue Waterfall
    Blue Waterfall is about the classic problem of jealousy, and does not have a clear beginning or ending. A man tries to distract a woman with sweet fantasies, while other misnomers come into play and lead her down dark pathways.
  • Bridge
    People walk across a bridge...
  • Bush Wact
    Bush Wact is an anti-war collage with scratch animation on the face of George W. Bush.
  • Chicken Scratch
    A man and his pregnant wife are hit by lightning while walking their pet chicken. Shortly after, she gives birth to a chicken boy. He grows up to be a crime fighting superhero. This film is full of scratch animation and plenty of hijinx.
  • Come In The Raw 3!!!
    Max finds himself on a gravel road in the middle of nowhere. He loses consciousness after being hit by anautomobile. When he awakens he encounters several unique characters who do not follow the same rules oftime that we are accustomed to. Is Max dreaming?
  • Deco Dawson, Volume 1 (1998-2003) DVD
    In 1998 filmmaker Deco Dawson appeared on the filmmaking scene in Winnipeg, Manitoba, reintroducing techniques of the silent period, particularily the use of adrenalin-infused quick-paced editing, the use of lens obstructions and authentic period photography.

    Dawson has since created 7 short films, all chronicled in this DVD edition, and has received much international acclaim. dawson's filmography has been featured in its entirety as special screenings at the Cinematheque Ontario, the Pacific Cinematheque, the Canadian Film Institute, the Calgary International Film Festival, the Northwest Film Forum, Cinema du Clef, as well as others.

    Dawson's film(dzama) won the best short award at the 2001 Toronto International Film Festival and the most technically innovative award at the 202 Ann Arbour Film Festival. In 2002, dawson was named one of the top 25 young filmmakers in North America by Filmmaker Magazine.

    short films on DVD

    film(emend)
    film(luster)
    film(knout)
    film(lode)
    film(dzama)
    The Fever of the Western Nile
    Defile in Veil
  • Embowered
    A "bower" is an enclosed garden but also a medieval woman's private chambers. Embowered is a short re-telling of The Lady of Shalott and an exploration of the restrictive demands of femininity. Inspired by the imagery of Julia Margaret Cameron, Embowered was shot on B&W 16mm, hand-processed, hand coloured and then transferred to video.
  • Fancy, Fancy Being Rich
    Part silent film, part opera aria, Guy Maddin's film is a delirious celebration of love, lust, and deceit. Internationally celebrated Canadian soprano, Valdine Anderson performs the aria from Thomas Ades' avant-garde opera Powder Her Face. Maddin's video tells the story of a mythic group of Drowned Men who rise from Lake Winnipeg to seduce village women and steal their favourite possessions. The Globe and Mail says this film is gothic as all get-out and mordantly funny while being insanely sexy.
  • Jack's Prophecy
    Extreme human emotions often create extremely irrational behaviour. For Jack, the loss of his marriage, his child, and ultimately his life as he knew it, has sent into an emotional tailspin from which he may never return. A sense of quiet madness, explored through his internal voice, prevails as Jack's inability to accept his predicament results in his downfall. His desperate sense of false hope ultimately results, metphorically, in his self-fulfilling prophecy, a delusional reunion with his daughter.
  • Living With It
    A woman lives with the echoes of a trauma, and life becomes about just trying to get through the day.
  • Memory
    A woman sleeps on her bed of memories, dreaming of precious childhood moments. Memory was processed and coloured by hand.
  • Mutual Cadence Trilogy (Flesh Gridlock, Cell Variations)
    In a fusion of traditional and modern filmmaking processes, grainy 16mm source material filmed with a hand-wound Bolex camera is digitally layered upon itself, combining two sources of unrelated imagery in a kaleidoscopic composite. The warm images of a woman's body are combined with moments at a desolate beach in autumn. The cohesion of the images comes from motion within the respective images and the mutual rhythm shared by the woman's movements and the beach environment.
  • Pictures of the Interior
    photographs, memories, travels, observations, kimchi, and root beer...
  • The Arousing Adventures of Sailor Boy
    Sailor boys are the stuff of dreams in the prairie provinces. Bisch proves that this lack doesn't make them any less desirable. You are not going to wake up from this one without getting a little wet.
  • The Black River (El Rio Negro)
    A mountain man takes a canoe ride on the Black River, and finds himself faced with hot, white, murderous death.
  • The Fever of Western Nile
    Summer passings observed the enigmatic West Nile malady stel its way into the minds and forests of Winnipeg wanderers, casting its feverish amnesia spell; immobilizing wooded creatures collectively pleading to e cured and released of their infirmity. A caution wanderer disregards her own ailment to aid the others as best she can; however the forest hosts its own fevers.
  • The Fight
    The Flight is about the imagination invading the real. A woman waits in an airport, and dreams of a lover who does not show up to find her. The Flight is about waiting, and the pain of it.
  • The Spawn of Pickerel Ron
    Trouble is on the menu at the Selkirk spring buffet when giant pickerel caviar is the main course. Pickerel Ron cums to save the day. Hand-processed and tinted.
  • Treatise on Prairie Mysticism, A
    An experimental dark comedy about an aging prairie poet who tells the fantastical tale about the birth of her muse.
  • 38 Jansky Units
    A work of comedy, a work of art. The content is debatable, but the colour is good and the soundtrack is interesting. Just like an experimental film.
  • Argentina
    The dispassionate calm of a solitary man is captured with disturbing clarity. The sound and images of Argentina mirror the stoic calm of this lone man.
  • Bad Karma
    A collage film that operates on a variety of levels, both emotional and technological, to explore the artists relationship to the end of the 20th century.
  • Before the Last War
    The dangers are receding but the shadows remain. In 1981, Joe Vismeg asked people on the street, 'What do you think of nuclear disarmament?'. This simple question elicits confusion, misinformation and apathy. An amusing and sometimes frightening examination of public opinion regarding nuclear disarmament.
  • Bite
    A car, water, an arm, a poem, titles, and credits. At one second, the worlds shortest film.
  • Dialogue
    dialogue explores the creation of identity. In this case, the identity of Moira, a hauntingly beautiful and passionate young woman. This is her story: a movement from passive recipient to active creator of her own identity. dialogue concludes with an explosive, and shocking decision.
  • Did An Ocean Know?
    An ancient ocean resonates in the human subconscious in this exploration of memory.
  • Exquisite Corpse, The
    The Exquisite Corpse is an exciting and unique collaborative work by 11 filmmakers. Their individual segments are linked through a game Surrealist artists of the 1920's used to explore the collective imagination. In playing the game, called the Exquisite Corpse, poets would each supply one line of a total poem, or artists would each draw a particular part of the human figure, without seeing how the others have fashioned their parts. The result was a fantastic, bizarre figure, an Exquisite Corpse. That surrealist experiment has been adapted for a new medium - film. Individual directors were: Pierre Naday, Tricia Wasney, Tim Bewcyk, Carole O’Brien, K. George Godwin, Michael Drabot, Paula Kelly, Jim PomeroyCliff Hokanson, Dean Naday, and Gilles Hebert.
  • Forever
    An experimental short exploring the tenuous grasp the promises we make have on our lives.
  • Messages
    'The fear of being alone is central to human experience, most often the moments of lucidity we have in our lives occur when we are alone.' Messages is like a bad dream after reading a supermarket tabloid. The film relays a barrage of commercial sound that only adds to the confusion of our own emotions.
  • Monday with the Martins
    The Martins would be a common, happy couple if it weren't for the fact that Mr. Martin's penis is a fully functional hand on the end of a short arm.
  • Muse
    What happens to someone who contains richness, and beauty, who becomes afraid of showing it to the world?
  • Odilon Redon
    Keller an old sub-aquatic locomotive engineers, and his son Caelum witness a train collision and rescue from its wreckage an orphaned pre-adolescent girl-snail, Berenice. Keller and Caelum adopt Berenice as a member of their family. Keller even names his beloved steam engine after his daughter.

    When Berenice reaches puberty, both Keller and Caelum fall in love with her, becoming romatic rivals. A disturbed Berenice runs away to marry a Zepplin pilot, only to be kidnapped by her adoptive father. Keller is blinded in a train mishap. Caelum loses his head and turns into a flower. Berenice turns into a cactus.
  • Pornography Begins at Home
    721 images in five minutes. Pornography Begins In the Home is a vibrating collage of the visual art of C. Graham Asmundson.
  • Quality Time
    A woman caught between her brother and her magician lover as they cascade through urban and rural landscapes in an effort to define themselves independent of the noise of media images.
  • Roses, Thorns...and Dreams
    A woman explores her feelings at the end of a relationship.
  • Routines
    Performance poetry, charming crutches, blood and microphones - a typical morning routine.
  • Separate Bees
    Deep within the bowels of the City of Winnipeg lurk three women and a screaming man in a shopping cart. A romantic poem in the tradition of Keats and Ezra Pound.
  • Spadiemski Pwalki
    Shot entirely in Warsaw, Poland, a polish post-communist love story set in the urban chaos of a farmers market in the city's centre.
  • Tales From The Gimli Hospital
    Perhaps the most popular movie ever made in Manitoba, this dreamlike cult film is set during a smallpox epidemic in Gimli, Manitoba near the turn of the century. Gunnar and Einar, are two men who share madness, jealousy, smallpox and a small room in the Gimli Hospital. Trouble lurks because each carries a dark secret.
  • The Elusive
    A visual poem, images of women moving backwards are juxtaposed with words of memory, the elusive nature of what is remembered as real and what one wanted to be real.
  • Under Chad Valley
    A chilling, thought provoking drama set in a metal tank deep in the underground, punctured by large tree roots. Two butchers slice and separate large chunks of meat as two girls bear witness to their strange homosexual relations.
  • With Frogs and Fishes
    A young woman's search through a whirlpool of emotion to understand the senseless drowning of her first love.
  • Affirmation of Jimmy Brown, The
    In a world made up of things, objects and posessions, one can be lost amongst all their stuff. In the meditative world of Jimmy Brown, where one collects and surrounds themself with wonderful artifacts that speak to you in unknowing ways, one can find comfort in knowing that if you ever forget who you are, these posessions can help you reaffirm your place in the world.
  • Eighteen Thousand Dead In Gordon Head
    In the summer of 1982, during a visit to the poet/filmmaker�s hometown, he witnessed the murder of a teenage girl � killed by a sniper on a quiet, suburban street. He returned a year later to lie with his camera on the spot where she died, and to roam the neighbourhood searching for footage.The title of this film comes from the oft-quoted statistic that the average sixteen-year-old has witnessed 18,000 murders, on TV and at the movies. �Gordon Head� is the Canadian suburb where the film takes place.
  • Elevations
    About the horro of drowning in carpet tunnels while information overloads the brain, and how this tension goes alongside the soothing silk of post-modern decor, as if the architecture was meant to pre-empt all other human emotions. It begs the question, have we built our own sweet chrome lilac prison?
  • French Ship
    In a fishing village, a woman waits anxiously. Will her men return safely? She summons visions of past expectations and calls on her courage.
  • Kiss Off, The
    A look into the minds eye of a girl, or a boy, during a kiss.
  • Neighbours Walk Softly
    A film poem about �neighbourhood�. It was inspired by the filmmaker-poet�s shooting images in and around a middle class Vancouver neighbourhood over the period of a year. The act of looking through the camera�s lense caused him to realize what wasn�t there to see. That even though there weren�t any physical fences to keep out the poor, the less �beautiful�, somehow they were missing from the resulting footage. Other, less visible, but nevertheless powerful, forces were at work to very effectively exclude, to create distinct �neighbourhoods�.

    The poem explores how these divisions are anything but innocent, as we can plainly see when they become more visible in times of crisis.
  • perhaps/We
    Within the mystic spaces of a Judaic self doubt falls a dreaming painter from the fallen Polish city of Lodz. A million murdered spirits bring to him into a world of faded photographs and stone angels, whose petrified teardrops forever scar the widowed landscape of Poland.
  • ReRuin
    �Which ever word you speak you owe to destruction� Hand-processed sound/picture explores the intimate relationship between destruction and creation.
  • trains of winnipeg - 14 film poems
    The films that make up trains of winnipeg - 14 film poems are a multi-media collage of many film and video formats, from Super 8, Super 16, and 35mm, to VHS 'found footage', to the latest digital technology, including an entire frilm made with a Pentax 430RS pocket camera.
  • 3 Minutes Before 8
    A contrasting cross section of the private and the public, the hectic and the peaceful in the early morning minutes before eight am.
  • Christmas in Brandon
    Christmas Eve in Brandon, a bottle or two, and the warm smile and winning demeanor of poet and actor Randy Woods as he recounts their combined effects.
  • Claire's Vision
    A young woman locked out of her house finds herself preoccupied by daydreams that take on a life of their own leading her away from her home.
  • Doc1.doc
    A work using the basic dramatic skeleton of a Greek tragedy while hanging rancid bits of comtemporary meat on the bones. Fashioned in the school of prairie surrealism, revolving around the theme that The gods don't know how to cook.
  • Fascist Can't Dance, A
    An amusing and entertaining experimental work that salvages blueprint filmmaking, where the script totally controls the finished film. By contrasting the calculating procedures of the director with the spontaneous invention of the storyteller, the film suggests filmmaking move from reproduction of a given conception to a more creative process, where the film actually happens while being shot.
  • Game of Death, A
    An experimental black comedy set in a war torn London. A brief glimpse into the lives of three people whose fates intertwine, testing their moral limits. Clyde Smythe confronts evil double agent Simon Marquette, the man who killed his brother despite repeated warnings from his lover, Charlotte.
  • Holland's New Queen
    Visual images that confront us daily are in constant flux. Only traces of their existence remain in our conscious thoughts.
  • Hospital Fragment
    The attempts of a young man (Neale) to consummate his love for a young woman (Heck) are thwarted by a fish monger (Fehr). The woman's beloved (Gottli) cuts bark fish.
  • M.O.Y.
    A film shot in three sequences, each sequence corresponds to one of the letters in the title of the film. The title M.O.Y. gets it's meaning only from the actions within the film narrative itself, and lacks any meaning outside the film.
  • Okeedoke
    A portrait of the filmmakers former brother-in-law, Steve Jackson, with psychedelic photograph animation synchronized to music performed by Chuck Aliamo.
  • Park
    Comic Randy Woods shows how stress makes us stupid.
  • Roomtone
    Roomtone skillfully redirects the audience's attention away from narrative and character towards the suggestiveness of artifacts and sounds. We not only begin to look at and listen to different things, but also to look and listen differently, participating in the film in a creative way by making imaginative connections among the visual and aural elements. The film we see is a function of how we assemble the clues.
  • Seasons
    As the sun rises, a new season is beginning. With the setting of the sun, the season is over and a new one is about to begin.
  • Spinning the Red Rose
    A short film about circles, their textures, forms and influence on the creative imagination.
  • Time
    The film offers a parable about the relationship between the Canadian government and the people it serves. Time tells the story of an idealistic civil servant and an innocent citizen whose lives suddenly intersect in a bureaucratic encounter over one of the foundations of our existence.
  • West Quarter, The
    A leisurely stroll through a field of sunflowers, with the sun breaking through.