A One/Two/Many/World

An experimental film from Arthur Lipsett, Free Fall is an assortment of film trimmings assembled to make a wry comment on humankind in today’s world. It evokes a surrealist dream of our fall from grace into banality.

This experimental short documents the clash, sometimes obsessive, sometimes glorifying, between humans and their mechanized environment. Using photographs, the animator creates varying perspectives through optical manipulation and changing colour, achieving bold and provocative effects.

Warning: This film contains flashing images and stroboscopic sequences

This experimental animated short takes a critical look at consumerism in a material world. Thousands of cut-out ads are presented in increasingly fragmented, rapid succession. The film's disorienting and hectic pace seeks to interrogate the extent to which seductive advertising is a shockingly strong force in shaping our desires, needs, and lives in contemporary capitalism.

This documentary from Martin Duckworth features young adults from two distinct Winnipeg neighbourhoods on either side of the Red River who struggle to overcome geographical and cultural barriers. High school students from the predominantly Indigenous North End and their peers from the Francophone district of St. Boniface work together to produce a play on the origins of the Métis.

Their collaboration raises questions about how these youths foresee their role and place within their respective communities and how these minority communities co-exist with the predominant culture. The film also tackles issues of intolerance, racism and discrimination.

Pia Yona Massie's Sayonara Super 8 uses personal archival footage to ask questions about the fragile nature of memory, human relationships and the foibles of the medium itself.

In this short film, a young man, a girl and a dog attempt to fly with wings more symbolic than practical. Music by poet Leonard Cohen, performed by The Stormy Clovers.

In this experimental animated short, Ryan Larkin (Walking) creates a series of figures who move across the screen and disappear into a hole. Eventually, the hole metamorphoses into a bridge, on top of which stands the young man from whom the others figures originated.

Animator Paul Driessen sets eight interlocking tales to the music of Vivaldi's Four Seasons in this animated short. Toying with traditional storytelling structures, Driessen allows his stories to unfold simultaneously in eight different windows on screen. Like Vivaldi, he uses the seasons to delineate the work.

Mamori transports us into a black-and-white universe of fluid shapes, dappled and striated with shadows and light, where the texture of the visuals and of the celluloid itself have been transformed through the filmmaker’s artistry. The raw material of images and sounds was captured in the Amazon rainforest by filmmaker Karl Lemieux and avant-garde composer Francisco López, a specialist in field recordings. Re-filming the photographs on 16 mm stock, then developing the film stock itself and digitally editing the whole, Lemieux transmutes the raw images and accompanying sounds into an intense sensory experience at the outer limits of representation and abstraction. Fragmented musical phrases filter through the soundtrack, evoking in our imagination the clamour of the tropical rainforest in this remote Amazonian location called Mamori.

A superb visual trick that will mystify its audience, this animated film transforms the commonplace into magic.

This experimental short explores the dual use of film as both mnemonic device and documentary archive. To achieve this, filmmaker Amanda Dawn Christie uses images from home movies that have been damaged, leaving edge code, sprockets, and optical tracks exposed.