Canada’s WNDX Festival of Moving Image was conceived of in 2005 to bring wider attention to the unique independent and experimental filmmaking community in the city of Winnipeg and the larger prairie region that surrounds it. The festival sought to contextualize the evolving local filmmaking aesthetic within international experimental cinema. Twenty years later, while the festival has since emerged as the most important international experimental film festival in the region, it still maintains a strong focus on local work. The program A Prairie Syntax: A Feminist Mapping of Canadian Prairie Filmmaking pulls from the WNDX festival’s programming archives to present both early and later career works by 11 women artists. The area is home to a strong tradition of performance-based video art by women, which has been joined by a comparatively more recent emergence of technical analogue film experimentation and work incorporating found footage. This curatorial survey features work in all three of these forms, often with hybrid aesthetics, and maps a journey through private spaces and public landscapes, considering our relationship to site and place as both a construct and a source of ancestral connection.
– Cecilia Araneda
Threshold
by Freya Björg Olafson
5:25 min
2016
Threshold records Olafson’s response to the subtle yet repetitive movements of László Moholy-Nagy’s Light Prop for an Electric Stage. Restricted by the small storage room where the Light Prop was set up in Berlin’s Bauhaus Archive, the artist allows its movements to determine her own, improvising and experimenting on site and on camera.
Freya Björg Olafson is a Canadian intermedia artist who works with video, audio, animation, motion capture, XR, painting, and performance. She has been presented and exhibited internationally at festivals and galleries such as the Plug In Institute for Contemporary Art (Winnipeg), InterAccess Electronic Media Arts Centre (Toronto), Winnipeg Art Gallery, O.K. Centrum (Linz, Austria), Kling&Bang Gallen (Reykjavik, Iceland), and SECCA-South Eastern Centre for Contemporary Art (North Carolina, USA).
Revival
by Heidi Phillips
8:20 min
2009
Revival is a short 16 mm experimental film about isolation, risk and rescue. The film is derived from super 8 films that Phillips found in thrift stores in Montreal, which she then reprinted and processed by hand using various darkroom techniques, focused on images of helicopters and barren landscapes.
Heidi Phillips is a Canadian experimental filmmaker and artist with an affinity for the tactility of the filmic medium. She often uses thrifted super 8 films, contact printing and darkroom experiments, working with a process that frequently becomes part of the content, as grainy scratched films are merged with images lifted from found footage to create mesmerizing, transcendent works. Phillips’ works have been presented at festivals and venues including International Film Festival Rotterdam, Festival du Nouveau Cinéma, the European Media Art Festival, Images Festival and WNDX Festival of Moving Image.
Party Mix for One
by Liz Garlicki
3:09 min
2005
Party Mix For One is a comical view of the complexes epitomized by “I don’t fit in” and “I’ll be alone forever,” focusing on a hostess who looks for one particular savoury piece at her party.
Liz Garlicki is a multi-disciplinary Canadian artist that has exhibited nationally and internationally, including at the Winnipeg Art Gallery as part of the Super Novas program, Ottawa’s Gallery 101, Calgary’s New Gallery and the WNDX Festival of Moving Image. A former burlesque performer and part of the Central Canadian Centre for Performance trio, she works in performance on stage, live model, video and film. Her art practice focuses around social learning, behaviour, interactions and play with art.
Time Away
by Carole O’Brien
7:00 min
2007
With Time Away, O’Brien weaves found footage from an original anonymous filmmaker who filmed his personal travels around the world in the mid-1900s, into an inner, meditative road trip accompanied by three female guides, away from time and towards the transformative end of the road.
Carole O’Brien is one of Winnipeg’s most accomplished filmmakers of her generation, with an interest in interdisciplinary media art projects, hand-processed analogue film techniques, digital art practices, photography, poetry and fibre arts. Her films have screened at festivals and venues including International Film Festival Rotterdam, IndieLisboa, Melbourne International Film Festival, Chicago Underground Film Festival, Festival des Cinémas Différents et Expérimentaux de Paris, and the Atlantic Film Festival.
Tudor Village: A One Shot Deal
by Rhayne Vermette
5:15 min
2012
A collage film with a narrative inspired by the persona of the city of Winnipeg. In pursuit of an eclipse, the citizens of Winnipeg flee the city. Meanwhile, stranded in Tudor Village, the caretaker does his best to interrupt their trajectory and entice everyone to return.
Rhayne Vermette (Métis) was born in Notre Dame de Lourdes, Manitoba. While studying architecture at the University of Manitoba, she fell into the practices of image making. Primarily self-taught, she makes work that emphasizes an interruption of image through collage, photography, and analog filmmaking. Vermette’s works have screened internationally, including the Berlinale, the Toronto International Film Festival, Karlovy Vary and the New York Film Festival. Her first feature film, Ste. Anne, was the recipient of the Toronto International Film Festival Amplify Voices Award for Best Canadian Feature Film at the 2021.
DISILLUSIONED
by Jane McCreight
5:30 min
2023
DISILLUSIONED is an act of modified self-portraiture, filmed onto tape and distorted through analogue signal bending as a mechanism to mimic the artist’s relation to self-perception.
Jane McCreight is an emerging Canadian filmmaker and artist currently residing in Treaty 4 territory (Regina, Canada), experimenting with various processes and approaches to creating film. Her works have been presented at Neutral Ground in Regina and the WNDX Festival of Moving Image in Winnipeg.
Leaky Rad and the Studio Visit
by Nicole Shimonek
1 min
2020
Leaky Rad and the Studio Visit is a video work featuring the artist Nicole Shimonek in her studio, exploring themes of duality through design principles, snake imagery, body movement, and negative space. The video reflects the artist’s internal experience during the first COVID-19 lockdown.
Nicole Shimonek is a Canadian visual artist based in Winnipeg, working in sculpture, drawing, video, and performance. She has attended residencies in Canada, the UK, and France, and her work has been shown nationally and internationally. Through experimentation with different media, she explores symbolic meaning and the relationship between materials and actions. Shimonek’s work has been featured in a solo exhibition at Winnipeg’s Plugin ICA, and has been screened at festivals and venues including Harbourfront Toronto, Images Festival and WNDX Festival of Moving Image.
IKWÉ
by Caroline Monnet
4:45 min
2009
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. In Cree and French, with English subtitles.
Caroline Monnet is a multidisciplinary artist of Anishinaabe and French ancestry. With a deep interest in communicating Indigenous identity through complex cultural narratives, her artistic and cinematographic work grapples with colonialism’s impact, updating outdated systems with anishinaabeg methodologies. Her films have been presented widely internationally, including at the Berlinale, the Toronto International Film Festival, Sundance, and International Film Festival Rotterdam.
Water once ruled
by Christina Battle
6:14 min
2018
Collaging appropriated footage with original imagery, Water once ruled collapses the past, present and future into a single repeating loop. Linking the introduction of satellite imagery with the colonization of our own as well as other planets, the video considers water – and the lack there of – as the distressed resource connecting Mars’ history with Earth’s present and future.
Christina Battle is a Canadian artist and curator based in amiskwacîwâskahikan (Edmonton). Her practice focuses on thinking deeply about the concept of disaster: its complexity, and the intricacies that are entwined within it. She holds a B.Sc. with specialization in Environmental Biology from the University of Alberta, a certificate in Film Studies from Toronto Metropolitan University, an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute, and a PhD in Art & Visual Culture from the University of Western Ontario. Her works have screened internationally at festivals including the Berlinale, International Film Festival Rotterdam, and the Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival.
Congress
by Kyath Battie
4:02 min
2020
Through historical artifacts and contemporary realities mediated on 16 mm film, Congress constructs imprints of collective memory against the backdrop of a pristine and remote northern Canadian Yukon Territory. Incorporating flight and wing, possible collective memories are represented through a prism of vast tundra landscapes, a wrecked 19th century paddleboat, and ancient lichen fields.
Canadian filmmaker Kyath Battie’s work often explores nocturnal spaces and fictionalized encounters, examining the duality of realism and fantasy through hybrid fiction and intimate non-fiction portraits. Working fluently in 16 mm, photo-chemical processes and digital forms, her work often embodies story elements such as tension and anticipation through acute site-specific cinematography and soundscapes. Her works have been screened internationally at festivals including International Film Festival Rotterdam, Ji.hlava IDFF, Oberhausen Kurzfilmtage, Images Festival and Ann Arbor Film Festival.
Tuktuit
by Lindsay McIntyre
15 min
2025
Created with handmade and manufactured emulsions, Tuktuit (Caribou) explores the close and enduring connections between Inuit, caribou, lichen, and land use. Lichen film developers help process the images of a caribou hide being fleshed down to rawhide to make gelatin for handmade emulsion that is subsequently used to shoot the film.
Lindsay McIntyre is a Canadian filmmaker and multi-disciplinary artist of Inuit and settler descent originally from Edmonton, working primarily with analogue film. Her multiple award-winning short documentaries, experimental films and expanded cinema performances are often process-based, and for some she also makes her own 16mm film with handmade silver gelatin emulsion. Her films circle themes of portraiture, place, form and personal histories. Her works have been presented internationally, including at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, Mono No Aware, the Vancouver International Film Festival, the Edinburgh International Film Festival and Images Festival. McIntyre is also a skilled cinematographer whose credits include Rhayne Vermette’s Ste. Anne.
ABOUT THE CURATOR CECILIA ARANEDA:
Chilean-Canadian filmmaker Cecilia Araneda’s works have screened at festivals and venues such as Rotterdam, Visions du Reél, Ann Arbor, Jihlava, Uppsala, Festival du Nouveau Cinéma, Images and TIFF Wavelengths. Aesthetically, Araneda’s art practice is strongly rooted in the examination of private and public memory as it connects to identity, consciously working against the idea of the fully controlled image. Her family’s experience fleeing Chile’s military dictatorship and arriving in Canada as refugees also plays a large role in her body of work. Most well-known for her work in analogue film, Araneda works in experimental, documentary and fiction forms.
Araneda is also a national award-winning media art curator. In 2019, she became the first-ever curator from the prairies to be awarded the national Joan Lowndes Prize from the Canada Council for the Arts, for the quality of her independent curatorial practice in the visual and media arts. Araneda has curated programs for the WNDX Festival of Moving Image (an organization she co-founded with Solomon Nagler in 2005), the Gimme Some Truth Documentary Festival, the Winnipeg Cinematheque, the FICWALLMAPU Film Festival of the Mapuche Nation, the Harbour Collective / ImagineNATIVE, Gallery 101, the Winnipeg Cinematheque and the Art Gallery of Southwestern Manitoba, alongside pursuing ongoing independent curatorial research on Latin Canadian cinema.
ABOUT THE WNDX FESTIVAL OF MOVING IMAGE:
Based in Winnipeg, Canada, the WNDX Festival of Moving Image is a five-day experimental film festival held yearly in early October that serves as a meeting ground for experimental film on the Canadian prairies. The organization supports a diverse community of experimental moving image artists through an annual festival and year-round activities, contributing to local, national and international exchanges of artists and audiences.
WNDX was established in 2005 as a grass-roots organization intended to fill in service gaps in the local film community; and in particular to support a then-new generation of independent filmmakers who viewed their work in the field to be a professional art practice, without industry objectives. Winnipeg houses one of the most unique film creation cultures in Canada and is internationally recognized for its independent and experimental works. Prior to the first WNDX festival in 2006, however, there was no dedicated forum to provide access and context to this culture. WNDX aimed to become the most important presenter of new Winnipeg and prairie independent cinema, and this focus remains central to the festival’s programming identity into the present day.
