(Panu Johansson, Finland, 6 min)

This found-footage-based film describes one average workday in the factory environment. With a little fast-wind everything around, the machines and the people working with them, becomes one. The industrial atmosphere is completed with the audio-track, which has been compiled from ready-made loops and samples.

More info on the film and its background (including a longer and more detailed synopsis) can be found here.

(Alexis McCrimmon, US, 4 min)

Heron 1954 – 2002 is a visual eulogy that taps into the phenomena of makeshift memorials and small gestures of mourning. Honoring the life of a loved one who died due to an accidental opioid overdose, the film materializes the process of overdue bereavement by invoking a fragmented presence at the periphery of the mind.

(Dominic Angerame, US, 4 min)

A continuation in a series of films that I call “A City Symphony.”

(Mike Hoolboom & Jorge Lozano, Costa Rica, 8 min)

Based on a trove of photographs made by Koen Wessing, who bore the risk of documenting the streets of Santiago, even the dreaded stadium, newly filled with police backing the coup. When freshly elected president Allende began sharing resources with the poor, the reaction shot from Washington was predictably swift. One of Nixon’s oldest financiers worked for Pepsi, and coal mining interests were not far behind. In order to protect shareholders, the CIA put their favourite general in charge, a dictator who pipelined money into the American dream. But resistances old and new continued to grow, including interventions by radical feminist architect Josefina Mena-Abraham, a legacy of upholding the commons that persists to this day.

(Camille Pueyo, Belgium, 3 min)

Written during the confinement of March 2020, this film combines reflections on the gender-based violence suffered by the director with her reflections on the imminent disappearance of the island of her childhood. Patriarchal capitalism pushes them to withdraw from the world, to find shelter far from their assailants. But for both of them, is there anything other than disappearance as a survival technique?

(Dave Johnson, Canada, 4 min)

This film is the result of forcefully decomposed, hacked up, used and abused 16mm found footage obtained from the film of the same title by Roman Polanski and narrated by Orson Welles. The outcome of this unique experiment presents a new film which has been edited and optically printed into a violent mash-up of sound and image. The result of which becomes a metaphor for the break down of the current social and political climate and the struggles of those who want to gain power.

(Sasha Waters, US, 9 min)

“Maybe I will cast a younger woman to perform me, the ‘hockey mom’ in the voiceover…”

And so I did: six women a decade or more younger than I am, all artists I admire, speak a personal meditation on the early history of cinema, the anxiety of aging, and the woeful comedy of professional envy. 16mm footage of six “magic lantern” glass slides from the turn of the last century wryly evoke the Structural film tradition of anti-illusionist cinema and demystification.

(Guillaume Vallée, Canada, 2 min)

Created on an optical printer from hand-painted 16mm film, this moving image object embodies a state of mind about benevolence.

(Marcy Saude, United Kingdom, 15 min)

A 16mm record of gestation and its aftermath. Assembled from fragments of texts and necessarily domestic images, the film sets utopian desires for a more radical and comradely approach to birth, infant care, and gender against the background of interiors and isolation in pandemic times.

(Matt Soar, Canada, 3 min)

A handmade short, Billionaires… combines 16mm and 35mm ‘found’ footage, hand-woven elements, bits and pieces from the earliest days of the Lost Leaders project, and DIY frame-by-frame scanning using a Lego-modded lightbox. The film is ‘inspired’ (read: rocket-fueled) by the hideous spectacle of the richest men in the world pretending to be astronauts. It must take a fuck-ton of hubris to strut around like latterday space ‘pioneers’ (Ray-Bans, leather bomber jackets, exceedingly white teeth) while the world burns. Read the room #FFS.

(Penny McCann & Eric Walker, Canada, 10 min)

Drawn from Super 8 films in the artists’ personal archives as well as found amateur 8mm footage, Events in the Tunnel presents an absurdist abbreviated retelling of Canada’s colonial history as defined by that great colonial trope, the cross-country train trip. In the transitional void of a train tunnel, we witness familiar 19th and 20th century paradigms of white middle-class conformity as represented by images of travel, amusement, and domesticity, with Canadian culture embodied by a chimeric portrayal of the early 20th century painter Tom Thomson.

(Ryan Marino, US, 5 min)

Traversing the darkness and emerging into the light.

(James Edmonds, Germany, 9 min)

The little personal myths and structures we set up to aid the survival of the psyche in times of low harvest. Finding subtle points of reference in subject and camera movement, in the landscape, its details and the traditions of the season, I attempt to connect the outside with the embodied camera and the inward gesture of the brush.

The Engauge Experimental Film Festival, now in its 5th year, celebrates the art of analog experimental filmmaking. Only films that originate on celluloid film are eligible for the festival. In 2022, Engauge features 73 films from 15 countries, showcasing a wide variety of experimental techniques.

Most films will be presented as digital transfers, but the majority of film programs will also include 16mm and 35mm film prints. The festival closes with a solo show and expanded cinema performance by Kristin Reeves that will deploy nine 16mm projectors simultaneously in the NWFF lobby!

⚠️ Please note: NWFF patrons will be required to wear masks that cover both nose and mouth while in the building. We are not currently checking vaccination cards.