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Disappearance in Three Acts | Act One is an ethnography of violence reflecting on a history of conflict in Central Mexico. The video piece posits a decolonial approach to the visual representation of violence in Mexico, transporting us beyond the realm of suffering into a space for quiet contemplation as the violent terrain of occupation enters the frame. Following the pictorial European Romantic landscape tradition with its depiction of the uncontrollable power of nature, this piece is an investigation on enforced disappearance in rural Mexico, reclaiming undermined histories of everyday violence and economic struggle. The video piece appropriates visual motifs from 18th century European Romantic landscape tradition with its depiction of the uncontrollable power of nature and cataclysmic extremes, echoing violent occupation of land in rural Mexico. Through a poignant testimony of a kidnapping survivor, intertwined with the pastoral rural landscapes of her captivity, the video documents geographies of disappearance at the threshold of detectability.

Victor Arroyo is a video artist working in the crossfield between cinema and contemporary art. His films are informed by various modes of listening and seeing, emerging from long periods of observation and documentation. His practice is situated at the intersection between aesthetics, knowledge production and community-based research, often concerned with the encounters and tensions between lived experiences, knowledge regimes and the politics of display. His work is regularly programmed in museums and festivals internationally, including Kasseler Dokfest, Sheffield Doc/Fest, RIDM, Canadian Centre for Architecture CCA, BIENALSUR, Cinemateca de Bogotá, Cinémathèque Québécoise, Cinémathèque Pacific, Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro, Museo Chileno de Arte Precolombino, Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery, Center for Contemporary Arts Santa Fe, among others. Born in Mexico in 1977, and based in Montréal, Canada.

Baba Dana Talks To The Wolves is an impressionistic portrait of Baba Dana, an 85 year-old Bulgarian woman who has chosen to spend her life in the mountains, away from people and cities. She lives in one of the oldest monasteries in Bulgaria, Zelenikovsky Monastery. Once known as a favorite place of repose for Bulgaria’s last Tzar, the place is now known as Baba Dana’s home.

Ralitsa Doncheva (b. 1987) is a Montréal-based filmmaker, originally from Bulgaria. A graduate from The Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema in Montreal, she makes short films and video installations. Her recent works are focused between documentary and experimental cinema using analogue film techniques and photochemical processes.

"We imagine the lives under the mortar, but how do we recognize the end of a bottomless silence?" - Michel-Rolph Trouillot

Ryan Ermacora (1991, British Columbia) and Jessica Johnson (1988, Nova Scotia) are award winning filmmakers based in Vancouver, B.C. Their work investigates the traces of history in landscape. While they make documentaries and documents, they’re critical of the genre`s claim to truth and objectivity, therefore they approach their practise using structuralist, self-reflexive and affective strategies to undermine the possibility of those claims in their own work. As a result, their films are often materially playful and inventive. They have screened at the Vancouver International Film Festival, DOXA Documentary Film Festival, WNDX: Festival of Moving Image, and as a two channel film installation at the Alternator Center for Contemporary Art.

Après une brouille de 15 ans, Ryan Feldman retrouve Cécile, sa grand-mère qui se retrouve bien seule après l´enterrement du grand-père. Sur les trois années suivantes ils établissent un contact et la raison du fossé entre Cécile et son fils (le père de Ryan) est révélée. L´humour reste le seul exutoire dans un contexte de luttes parallèles où le petit-fils se débat pour trouver sa place dans le monde tandis que sa grand-mère se bat pour son indépendance qui s´evanouit rapidement de sa vie. Alors que Cécile s´éloigne de la réalité elle retombe dans ses mémoires d´enfance, quand elle devait fuir les persécutions antisémites. Lick Salt est un documentaire personnel qui parle d´héritage culturel, de séparation et de survie et qui célèbre les mishigas! (folie) de la vie.

Ryan Feldman est un réalisateur indépendant basé à Toronto. Son premier film Eulogy/Obverse, a été projeté lors de nombreuses manifestations internationales et a été recompensé par de nombreux prix, dont le Best Experimental lors du Festival Mondial du Film à Montréal en 1999 et le prix Jay Scott pour la meilleure production toutes catégories confondues lors du TVO´s Telefest Competition. Son second film, FOLK, a été projeté en première au Festival International du Film de Toronto en 2002 et fut récompensé par le Prix Spécial du Jury lors du Cinematexas Short Film Competition et par le Top Prize au Up-&-coming festival du film de Hannovre. En 2004 il a travaillé en tant que journaliste vidéo à la CBC, filmant et dirigeant des parties de documentaires pour l´émission TV hautement considérée "Nerve". En 2006 Ryan Feldman créait RyFe Productions Inc. en même temps qu'il diffusait son long métrage dans lequel il se mettait lui même en scène. Ce dernier a été projeté en avant première, au Festival du Cinéma du Réel, festival de films documentaires à Paris. Lick Salt a aussi été sélectionné pour le Festival du Film de Cork en Irlande, et pour le festival du film documentaire de Montréal (RIDM). Il est diplômé du Sheridan College, en Arts média.

A young Slovakian immigrant opens a uranium mine near Elliot Lake in northern Ontario, and later builds a massive replica of the modest church from his childhood village. Stranded amongst suburban streets named after prize-winning Holstein cows, now sits this monumental cathedral, unfinished and private. Teenage zombies emerge from lakes and rivers around Serpent River First Nation, once poisoned with uranium waste. There is talk of eugenics at a Holstein pageant, and a retired dairy farmer and his wife remember a recurring dream where their work is never done.

Parastoo Anoushahpour, Faraz Anoushahpour and Ryan Ferko have worked in collaboration since 2013. Their shared practice explores the interplay of multiple subjectivities as a strategy to address the power inherent in narrative structures. Foregrounding the idea of place as a central focus, their work seeks to both decode their surroundings and trouble the production of images through speculative narration and dialectical imagery. Shifting between both gallery and cinema contexts, recent projects have been presented at Berlinale, Punto De Vista International Documentary Festival, Viennale, Media City Film Festival, New York Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, and others internationally.

How to resurrect a past that was never one's own to being with? The possibilities of reincarnation through satanic ritual or synthetic biology offer faint options against a landscape seemingly indifferent to the questions asked of it. Hrovji, Look at You From the Tower materializes in disparate parts of former-Yugoslavia, connected at its ends by an abandoned family farm now only accessible by illegally crossing the border of the European Union. Upon crossing, the film spirals from the perspective of a tower, down into the earth of pre-history and past lives. Through encounters with 1970's stadium rock, teenage idleness, and amateur archeology opens a hallucinatory state of memory between generations and morphing nations, searching to locate some trace of identity in an increasingly fractured present.

Ryan Ferko is an artist and filmmaker based in Toronto, Canada. Across cinemas and galleries his work is concerned with landscapes as unstable sources of narration, turning to myth, story-telling, amateur experts, and distorted memories as a way to find narratives alternative to official histories. Recent work has been shown at Projections (New York Film Festival), Wavelengths (Toronto International Film Festival), International Film Festival Rotterdam, International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, Media City Festival (Windsor/Detroit), Experimenta (Bangalore), Crossroads Festival (San Francisco), ZK/U Centre for Art & Urbanistics (Berlin), and Justina M. Barnicke Gallery (Toronto).

Space Down is a feature-length collage film made with amateur footage retrieved on the Internet. It documents the bootstrap of an astronaut community here on Earth who migrates to space in the confines of their homes. The film is a detournement of the COVID-19 lockdowns that renders visible the Earth momentarily as one of the biggest space analogues in history.

In his ongoing quest to explode the film frame, Dominic Gagnon’s flurry of internet collage films not only cull the lonely, shocking margins of YouTube to captivate us with pixelated self-representations of despair, anger, and survivalism, they also challenge and question the definition of what constitutes cinema. (Text: J.P. Sniadecki)

A portrait of my pal Jorge Lozano, lensed in our A Space gallery exhibition as he talks the talk. He brings back early moments in Toronto, Sam the Record Man meets Norman McLaren. His outsider immigrant frames underline a marriage of art and politics, forever searching for new approaches that will birth new ideas. Along the way he muses on the backdrop of his ongoing experimentalisms (150 movies and counting), moments of which punctuate his address. He winds up with an unrehearsed and deeply felt take on race and the unending wound of “where are you from?”

Mike Hoolboom began making movies in 1980. Making as practice, a daily application. Ongoing remixology. Since 2000 there has been a steady drip of found footage bio docs. The animating question of community: how can I help you? Interviews with media artists for 3 decades. Monographs and books, written, edited, co-edited. Local ecologies. Volunteerism. Opening the door.

« Public Lighting est une méditation sur la photographie et la création d'images, qui peuvent capturer, remplacer nos expériences, et leur survivre. Le film est divisé en 7 parties. Chaque chapitre est une étude de cas, de différents types de personnalités identifiés par le jeune auteur, qui nous guide dans le prologue. Le premier, homme gay, nous emmène faire la tournée des bars et des restaurants, où il a vécu des ruptures amoureuses. Il nous raconte sur le mode ironique ses histoires avec ses ex amants. Un hommage à Philipp Glass est suivi, de manière plutôt incongrue, par Hey Madonna, lettre de confession adressée à la chanteuse par l'un de ses fans, séropositif. Amy célèbre un autre anniversaire, mais avoue qu?elle n?a aucun souvenir de ce qu?elle voit à la télévision. Ceci dit, au moins elle a une caméra : "Je prends des images non pour m?aider à me souvenir, mais pour enregistrer mes oublis" . Hiro vit sa vie à distance, et s'aventure rarement au-delà de l'objectif. Un jeune mannequin anxieux raconte des événements poignants de son passé. Peu de réalisateurs se réapproprient le footage de manière aussi forte : à la fois drôles et incisives, ces images nous ramènent à des parties de nous-mêmes. Le travail récent de Mike Hoolboom a une telle empathie avec la condition humaine qu'il nous parle directement au c?ur. » Mark Webber, London film festival

Mike Hoolboom vit et travaille à Toronto, vidéaste et cinéaste, il a aussi écrit plusieurs livres, dont Plague Years en 1998, et Fringe Film in Canada en 2001. Il est membre fondateur du collectif Pleasure Dome, et a travaillé comme directeur artistique de l?Images Festival et dans le comité de direction de Canadian Filmmakers Distribution, pour le cinéma expérimental. Son travail a été montré notamment au festival de Berlin, de Rotterdam, de Locarno. Il a eu plusieurs rétrospectives dans huit grandes villes européennes.

Lensed in Ohio’s Broadview Developmental Center in 1967 by secret camera genius and audio visual healer Jeffrey Paull, Scrapbook tells the story of audacious autistic Donna Washington in her own words, as she encounters pictures of one of her former selves fifty years later.

Born: Korean War, the pill, hydrogen bomb, playboy mansion. 1980s: Film emulsion fetish and diary salvos. Schooling at the Funnel: collective avant-geek cine utopia. 1990s: experimentalist features, transgressive psychodramas, questions of nationalism. 2000s: Seroconversion cyborg (life after death), film-to-video transcode: feature-length-found-footage bios. Fringe media archaeologist: copyleft author 7 books, co/editor 12 books. Curator: 30 programs + www.fringeonline.ca Occasional employments: artistic director Images Fest, fringe distribution Canadian Filmmakers. 80 film/vids, most redacted. 10 features. 70 awards, 15 international retrospectives. 3 lifetime achievement awards. www.mikehoolboom.com

A former mining town in remote northwest British Columbia, Anyox is now marked by mountainous slag piles accumulated as a byproduct of the early 20th century copper smelting process. ANYOX tracks the daily work of the town’s two sole residents, who organize and salvage value out of this seemingly endless mass of industrial waste. Concurrently, the film unfolds a complex labour history and reveals the vestiges of immense environmental degradation produced by the company town model. ANYOX explores a history of labour press dissemination, activism and the severe reaction from industry and government. Interlacing past and present, ANYOX combines large format cinematography of the contemporary landscape with a study of the archival record, considering the aesthetics it carries, as well as how it reveals and obscures narratives.

Jessica Johnson and Ryan Ermacora are award-winning filmmakers based in Vancouver, BC. Their work investigates the visible and invisible ways in which humans have engraved themselves into the biosphere. Formally, their work is defined by a structural approach to filmmaking, engaging with the optics of cinema while illustrating the experience of labour in dialogue with landscape. Their work has screened at festivals and cinemas including Cinéma du réel, The Walker Art Center, Festival du Nouveau Cinéma, Open City Documentary Festival, DOXA, and VIFF.

In 1962, Oscar Niemeyer was invited to conceive an international fairground in the city of Tripoli, Lebanon, which was never completed. To Remain in the No Longer looks at how architecture operates in this failed state. By examining the precarity of the project site that remains to this day, the film reflects on the country’s current socio-economic crisis. Employing archival materials, interviews, and 16mm and digital film, the experimental documentary explores the political and cultural forces that have come to bear on the site—from its halted construction to its imposed abandonment and attempted reappropriations. How has architecture been instrumentalized in the ongoing construction of a national narrative? What is the role of architects in shaping society within corrupt ecologies of power and failed financial engineering? Film becomes a plastic medium to reframe the positivism of urban masterplans and architectural monuments and formulate a social critique. Modern structures under threat of collapse stand in as protagonists to tell the story of a promised metropolis that never came to be, while the fairground acts as a lens to look at implicit collapse beyond the perimeter of the site.

Based between Beirut and Amsterdam, artist and filmmaker Joyce Joumaa earned a BFA in Film Studies from Concordia University in Canada. In 2021-2022, Joumaa had her first institutional solo show at the CCA The Canadian Centre for Architecture. Her work has shown at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Fofa Gallery, the Sharjah Architecture Triennial and in the 2024 60th Venice Biennale.

It is hard to navigate in the dark, especially in an unknown territory. Over time, the eyes adjust to the darkness, and the new environment starts to emerge. This video was made during an artist residency at CFS Alert, a military and research station in the high Arctic. CFS Alert is the northernmost settlement in the world, 800 km from the North Pole. From October to early March there is polar night, with no direct sunlight. Most people at the station are there for limited time, on average 3 to 6 months.

Thomas Kneubühler vit au Canada depuis 2000. Il est titulaire d?une maîtrise en beaux arts de l?Université Concordia. Son travail a été présenté dans de nombreuses expositions individuelles au Canada et dans le cadre d?expositions collectives au Canada, en Chine, en Suisse, aux Pays-Bas, en Allemagne et au Mexique.

A conference call by investors of a planned iron mine provides the soundtrack for a ride over the land which the company wants to exploit. The land in question is a traditional hunting ground for the Inuit community of Aupaluk, located in Canada's far North. The village has already been relocated in the 1980 and is now again under threat. The term "forward looking statements" is used in the world of investors to describe future events which are subject to certain risks and uncertainties.

Born in Solothurn, Switzerland, Thomas Kneubühler has been living in Canada since 2000. In 2003, he completed a Master’s degree in Studio Arts at Concordia University, Montreal. His work often deals with social issues and how technology is affecting people’s lives. His work has been presented in many exhibitions in both Europe and North America, most recently at the Québec Triennial at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (2011), at the Centre culturel canadien, Paris (2012) and at the Centre Pasquart, Bienne (2014). In 2011 he was awarded the Pratt & Whitney Canada Prize of the Conseil des arts de Montréal, and in 2012 the Swiss Art Award by the Ministry of Culture Switzerland. «Whether it is the ambiguous boundaries of public and private space, the all-pervasive spectre of security surveillance or even the radiant, if dehumanizing, beauty of cityscapes, Kneubühler’s practice tellingly identifies the co-existing insecurities, uncertainties and subtle pleasures embedded in the structures of modern life.» (Bryne McLaughlin, Canadian Art)

Somehow Continue is a document of an unprecedented and fleeting moment in time set in a piece of urban wilderness located in the cultural heart of Montreal’s Mile End. A cinematic capsule shot on 16 mm that is an ode to instability and collective resiliency.

Karl Lemieux is a filmmaker, who's work is inspired by the dialogue that occurs between film, music and sound art. At the heart of his practice, also including narrative filmmaking, the importance of the cinematographic apparatus and the attachment to celluloid are essential. His films, installations, and performances have screened internationally in museums, galleries, music venues and film festivals including: the Montreal Contemporary Arts Museum, the MOMA - Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco, the Austrian Film Museum in Vienna and the Eye Filmmuseum in Amsterdam. He is known for his collaboration with Godspeed You! Black Emperor, a Montreal music collective for which he does live 16mm film projections since 2010. He is also the co-founder of Double Négatif, a Montreal-based collective, dedicated to the production and dissemination of experimental films. His first feature, Maudite Poutine (2016), premiered in the Orizzonti competition of the 73rd Venice International Film Festival presented by the Venice Biennale.

L'oeuvre "Opération Nunalivut" d'Emmanuelle Léonard a été réalisé lors d’une résidence de recherche dans le Grand Nord canadien au sein du Programme d’arts des Forces canadiennes. Poursuivant le travail photographique et vidéographique réalisé depuis quinze ans sur des groupes hiérarchisés issus des systèmes social, judiciaire, militaire et religieux, l’artiste continue de s’intéresser ici aux fonctions d’autorité et aux mécanismes de détournement qu’elles engendrent. En assistant aux manœuvres des patrouilles d’affirmation de la souveraineté canadienne à Resolute Bay sur l'île de Cornwallis dans le Haut-Arctique, Emmanuelle Léonard a découvert un ensemble de réalités très diverse lors d'un déploiement militaire stratégique dans cette région du monde où les enjeux nationaux, politiques et économiques se trouvent exacerbés par les effets du réchauffement climatique. […] Dans un contexte de tournage difficile, Emmanuelle Léonard a filmé les activités des soldats retranchés derrière leurs boucliers contre le froid – vêtements, masques et lunettes –, les révélant tantôt fantomatiques et anonymes, tantôt bien réels et personnifiés. Attentive aussi bien aux exercices d’entraînement qui nivellent leur identité qu’aux personnes elles-mêmes et à leur perception du monde en marge du modèle militaire, l’artiste s’est faite le témoin de l’attente et de la passivité relative des soldats face à l’impuissance des moteurs qui refusent de démarrer, devant la troublante nuit nordique qui tarde à tomber ou qui s’éclipse, là où rien d’impressionnant n’est dit, n’est fait, n’est prétendu. (Louise Déry - Directrice, Galerie de l’UQAM – Université du Québec à Montréal)

Emmanuelle Léonard est née en 1971 à Montréal, où elle vit et travaille. Elle a obtenu une maîtrise à l’Université du Québec à Montréal. L’artiste compte de nombreuses expositions individuelles et collectives, notamment au Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (Canada); à OPTICA, Montréal (Canada); à VOX - centre de l’image contemporaine, Montréal (Canada); à la Galerie de l’UQAM, Montréal (Canada), au Mois de la Photo, Montréal (Canada); à la Kunsthaus Dresden (Allemagne); à la Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Berlin (Allemagne); à Mercer Union, Toronto (Canada); à Gallery 44, Toronto (Canada); à Glassbox, Paris (France); à L’Œil de poisson, Québec (Canada), etc. Elle a été artiste en résidence à la Villa Arson, Nice (France); à la Fondation Christoph Merian, Bâle (Suisse) et à la Fondation finlandaise de résidences d’artistes, Espoo (Finlande). Elle s’est méritée le Prix Pierre-Ayot, Montréal (Canada), en 2005. Elle a exposé en 2012 à la AGO – Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (Canada), dans le cadre du International Grange Prize pour lequel elle était en nomination, et en 2013 au Fresnoy – Studio national des arts contemporains, Tourcoing (France), dans le cadre de l’exposition "À Montréal, quand l’image rôde". En 2019, elle a exposé "Le déploiement" à la galerie de l'UQAM, Montréal (Canada), avec la commissaire Louise Déry. En 2020, elle était parmi les trois finalistes pour le Prix de photographie Banque Scotia.

You cannot pay your bill. – . Your heat and lights are cut off. -. You pay. The clocks initially flash 88:88, –:–. You set the clocks. You cannot pay. -. You pay. 88:88. –:–. Repeat. 88:88, –:–. Cut. -. You stop setting your clock to the time of the world. 88:88, –:– . Subtracted: – : you make do with suspension. 88:88, –:–, -.

Isiah Medina was born in 1991 and he lives in Toronto.

Les pelages bruns, beiges, blancs et noirs se fondent à l’ocre de la terre et des murs inondés de soleil. Calme à l’heure du repos, l’endroit devient assourdissant quand vient le moment de nourrir les bêtes, qui entament alors leur concert d’aboiements. Dans le refuge pour chiens errants d’Agadir au Maroc, plus de 750 animaux trouvent aide et protection en attendant d’être adoptés par une famille. Chaque journée ressemble à la suivante, rythmée par la seule distraction des repas. Avec un regard aussi empathique qu’alerte aux jeux de lumière et de textures, Halima Ouardiri observe la chorégraphie qui régit la vie de la population animale, dont le quotidien suspendu évoque l’attente bien plus tragique de millions d’êtres humains à la recherche d’une terre d’accueil.

Halima Ouardiri est cinéaste. Suisso-Marocaine, elle travaille entre le Canada, le Maroc et la Suisse. Elle a obtenu un B.A. en Science Politique et un B.F.A. en Production filmique à la Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema à Montréal (Canada). Son premier film, "Mokhtar", tourné en Super 16mm, a reçu un très bon accueil dans une centaine de festivals internationaux tels que le TIFF – Toronto International Film Festival (Canada); la Berlinale, Berlin (Allemagne); le Festival international du film de Rotterdam (Pays-Bas); et le Festival international du film de Dubaï (Émirats arabes unis), avant d’être diffusé sur France 3, sur CBC et sur la TSR. Le film a remporté de nombreux prix, dont deux Prix de la Meilleure Réalisation et cinq Prix du Meilleur Film. Tourné dans un petit village du sud du Maroc, le film met en scène les villageois, beaucoup de chèvres et un hibou. De tous les interprètes, seul le hibou est un acteur professionnel. Aujourd’hui, Halima Ouardiri passe au long-métrage avec "Nico", un récit initiatique inspiré de son expérience comme garde du corps à Genève (Suisse), sa ville natale, et avec le développement du scénario de "La Camel Driving School".

À Niamey, le Docteur Galmo dirige un hôpital hors du commun. Ses patients en convalescence ne sont pas qui vous croyez.

Théodolitique (2015) est un projet cinématique qui réunit le géodésique et le filmique, unissant la très longue histoire de l’arpentage et celle, comparativement nouvelle, des technologies cinématographiques. Reliant ces deux méthodes d’observation visuelle et d’enregistrement, Théodolitique documente des étudiants arpenteurs de l’École des Métiers du Sud-Ouest de Montréal au cours d’une seule journée, lors d’un examen extérieur. Théodolitique utilise un large éventail de techniques filmiques et acoustiques — y compris un microphone parabolique pour capter les sons distants, ainsi qu’une « théodocam » construite sur mesure pour recréer le point de vue d’un arpenteur — afin de refléter et mimer la manière dont les étudiants bougent, réfléchissent et apprennent leur métier. Tourné sur un terrain dédié à la pratique adjacent à l’École des Métiers, Théodolitique est un film à la fois chorographique et chorégraphique.

The works of David K. Ross are concerned with the processes and activities which enable infrastructural monuments, cultural institutions, and architectural structures to exist. Using photography, film and installation to carry out these inquiries, he examines the performative capacities of un-scripted activities, along with the relationships that exist between the recorded event and its re-presentation in physical space. These inquires have been applied to various projects including a study of the enigmatic activities of student land surveyors, the uncanny and oneiric qualities of a series of rooms at the Art Institute of Chicago, the nuanced and poetic movements of dancers about to perform, the mythic and sublime qualities of an urban lighting fixture in Montréal, the quietude of artists’ storage spaces, and a close examination of colour coded art shipping crates.

Six avenues, in south-central Montreal, revisited.

Since completing his studies in film production at Concordia University, Roberto Santaguida’s films and videos have been shown at more than 400 international festivals, including Tampere Film Festival (Finland), CPH: DOX, Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival (Denmark), Contemporary Art Festival Sesc_Videobrasil (Brazil), Flickers' Rhode Island International Film Festival (United States), transmediale (Germany), and Message to Man (Russia). Roberto is the recipient of the K.M. Hunter Artist Award, the Chalmers Arts Fellowship and a fellowship from Akademie Schloss Solitude in Germany.