Screenings: Thursday September 24 to Saturday September 26, 2020
Livestreams: Program 1 – September 24, 2020 | 6:30
Program 2 in partnership with SHIFT 2020 – September 25, 2020 | 6:30

Factory Media Centre presents a curated screening of artist-made short films to watch on your cellphone! An intimate at-home viewing experience of local and regional creation developed over the past months speaks to the possibility of creation and artistic response in a time of new ‘normals’.

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Program 1: Thursday September 24 @6:30

Infinite Scroll
Alison Postma

Infinite Scroll is a video made at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic while the weight of an uncertain future loomed. I found myself passing time by scrolling endlessly through a social media feed populated by everybody else at home with nothing to do. The video visualizes this boredom, scrolling, and the ever-more familiar surroundings of my home.

Alison Postma is an artist based in Toronto. Her practice recently has explored the relationship between objects and the body. Overarching themes throughout her work include skewed perception in dreams, and ideas of the future from the past and the past from the present.

To Breathe The Sky
Natalie Hunter

To Breathe The Sky continues to my interest and research in mirror spaces, motion, memory, the senses, and light. In this experimental video installation, I consider the mirror mechanism of a camera in relation to the eye as it sees light, and the screens that we encounter daily. Using a mobile phone camera mounted to the dashboard of my car, in combination with hand-made colour filters and the mirrored surface of my wind-shield, I record short trips made to the grocery store on multiple occasions during the Covid-19 pandemic. Pointing to the sky, the camera reflects, bends, and activates light entering the camera. The sky-scape unfolds for the camera, producing subtle shifts in colour, traces of motion, and distortion. The resulting silent video is a series of soft, imperfect, experimental, and ethereal moving images that contain mirror imagery of my surroundings in addition to what I’m looking at with a lens. It suggests something akin to a memory rather than a recorded sequence of moments in time. Colour becomes scent, and motion resembles thought passing through the mind. At times it seems the sky is almost bouncing, as if you are looking through a moving mirror. At others, latent imagery of the film-makers hand, double exposures moving in opposite directions, light shards, and sun spots, are visible; making you aware that you are looking at the world through a screen. In other areas of the video, it seems as if you are floating, and not aware of what is up or down. As a result, To Breathe The Sky produces an encounter that speaks to the slowness of time and the process of recording an experience that relates more to the rhythms of our exterior environments than it does to digital reproduction.

Natalie Hunter is a Canadian artist who grew up in Hamilton, Ontario. She holds an MFA from the University of Waterloo, and a Bachelor of Art in Visual Art with a Concentration in Curatorial Studies from Brock University (First Class Standing). She has shown her work in Canada and the United States in numerous exhibitions. She is the recipient of several awards including Ontario Arts Council Visual Artists Creation Project Grants, and a Canada Council for the Arts Research and Creation Grant. Natalie Hunter lives and works in Hamilton, and teaches sessionaly at the University of Waterloo.

Aporophobia
Graeme Maitland

Aporophobia is an experimental short film that explores the fear of poverty and its consequences for the individual within the context of modern society. The simple act of enjoying a cup of coffee is bookended by a decision to accept the offer of a life of relative comfort, and ultimately accepting that life as being an OK place to land.
Shot on Super 8 and Super 16, manually spliced and assembled and then re-filmed from a flatbed editor, Aporophobia is meant to be a scrapbook of a film that captures a fleeting reflection on an artists life.

Graeme Maitland is an artist, illustrator and filmmaker based in Hamilton. Graeme’s professional history is in film exhibition, having coordinated and curated film festivals and film related cultural events. His personal work is raw, reflecting how he deals with the minutia of his life in the larger context of society.

Glen and Longwood
Robert Scott Hamilton

It takes a village to build a sidewalk

I’m an artist working with video, photography and installation. My work has exhibited in such venues as the Hilversum Museum, The Netherlands, Museum of Contemporary Art in Castello, Spain, The Rotterdam Film Festival and Transmediale in Berlin. My work has won awards such as the German Video Art Prize.

Dasein
Fer Rodriguez

A record of the passage of time, as an audiovisual collage; the images of daily life during the social distancing unleashed by the health crisis of COVID-19 are intermingled with audios of the current socio-political context and intimate messages from friends and family. The short film was filmed with a cell phone and the sound captured with an old cassette recorder. Made in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 2020.

I’m from Venezuela and I move out to Argentina when I was 19 years old in 2015 to study and work in filmmaking. I studied for three years at CIEVYC where I earned a scholarship to study the higher technical degree in Cinema and Audiovisual Arts from 2015-2018 and I specialized in the field of Photography. Since 2016 I have worked as a technician in the Camera branch and have participated in numerous advertisements, video clips, feature films, short films, and series as a camera assistant.

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Program 2: Friday September 25 @6:30

Factory Media Centre is pleased to welcome SHIFT 2020 as the programming partner for Program 2 of the Cellphone Film Festival. Shift 2020 is the culminating event of The Socrates Project, a dynamic forum for interdisciplinary collaborations, and public engagement with the pressing issues of our times. We can think of no better way to conclude this pilot than with a multi-disciplinary festival of dynamic speakers, powerful ideas, and diverse pathways to the future we hope to create. 

Crazy Times
Meghan McKnight, Ronley Teper

Themes of precariousness in our current apocalyptic climate and a musical call to unity in the form of an animated genesis myth. This two-dimensional, stop-motion animation done on a iphone uses paper from McKnights collage archive as well as some paper cut specifically for the video. All of the material used in creating this video was either thrifted, donated or found. The narrative is an allegory on creation, greed, and our capacity for redemption. The scale and setting in the video shift between the microcosmic and macrocosmic. A Collaboration between Meghan McKnight Concept, Stop Animation, Director, and Ronley Teper Music, Video Editing, Producer.

Meghan Mcknight is a Toronto-based visual artist whose work spans the genres of painting, collage, photography, and experimental stop-motion animation. McKnight holds an Hons. BA from University of Toronto in Visual Studies and English. Her work has been shown and collected internationally, and is a part of the Telus, The Granite Club and Donovan Collections, among others. McKnight’s unconventional, process based-works mimic natural processes, coalescing into sometimes grotesque, ambiguous combinations that blur the lines of media, scale, and setting. For her photo works and animations, she constructs collages using vintage and thrifted print material, a procedure she likens to painting with paper.

Gauss V
David Disher

The Gauss program aims to discover new life throughout our galaxy. On its 5th mission, the lone captain finds that there are some things that are better left undiscovered.

David Disher is a composer and filmmaker from Hamilton, Ontario. His work is a reflection of his fascination with darkness, atmosphere, and humanity’s place in a cold and uncaring universe.

Movements Between Moments
Ryan Ferguson

The process of reconstructing a memory through reorganizing the documentation of the moments between the significant events of that memory.

Ryan Ferguson is a musician, visual artist and curator from Hamilton, Ontario. Over the past twenty years working in the city under the artist name electroluminescent, he has more than 500 performances of his works taking place in over a dozen countries worldwide.

Gathering Wool
Linnea Siggelkow, Katie Sullivan, Kelsey Burns, Ariel Bader-Shamai

A story of the romance that comes to life in your mind when you have a crush on a stranger, and its bittersweetness.

Moments and feelings from your waking life are woven into a fantasy so real that the stranger becomes a character, the character becomes familiar. You play, you touch, you fall in love. This is the sweetness of it.

The bitterness of it is in waking.

Linnea Siggelkow is a Hamilton-based musician who writes, performs, and records under the moniker Ellis. In 2018 she released her debut EP, The Fuzz, which quickly drew international acclaim and caught the attention of Fat Possum Records. 2020 saw the release of her debut record, Born Again, which gracefully spotlight’s Ellis’s unhurried melodies, starkly confessional lyrics, and luminous vocals.
Katie Sullivan is a multidisciplinary artist living in Hamilton, ON. Her work is currently focused on zine curation and film. She closely explores how we connect with one another and ourselves based on past experiences, learned behaviours and identities. She aims to evoke new ways of understanding and overcoming – of sitting peacefully inside oneself.
Kelsey Burns is a multidisciplinary artist based in Hamilton, with a current focus on ceramics.
Ariel Bader-Shamai is a multidisciplinary artist and arts administrator based in Hamilton.

Portal.APP
Patricio Munoz

A short video shot with my Samsung Note10+ about an exhausted parent (Patricio Munoz) who just wants to have 2-minutes to himself but ends up wasting his free time exploring an unsolicited app mysteriously installed on his phone.

Patricio Munoz is a content creator who lives in Hamilton, Ontario. He is a devoted husband and father to two children. He has experience in post-production and has worked in broadcast television for 15 years but is new to film festivals. This is Patricio’s first short film entry.

The Joy Of Reconnection
Jessie Goyette

A father and daughter being guided through a traditional smudge for the first time together, and finding the joy in cultural reconnection and teachings.

Jessie Goyette is a queer indigenous multi media artist, arts educator, activist, and community development worker exploring topics in culture, empowerment, and the creation of a better world.

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Factory Media Centre’s programs are made possible through the generous support of the Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council, and Incite Foundation for the Arts. FMC would also like to thank SHIFT 2020 for sponsoring a selection of local and regional independent artist films to share with FMC’s audiences.