From Sept. 25-29, 10 venues across Winnipeg will be hosting the WNDX Festival of Moving Image. WNDX, created “by filmmakers, in support of filmmakers,” is a festival celebrating innovative and trailblazing work by filmmakers and video artists based locally, nationally, and internationally. This year’s festival features installations, expanded cinema, artist talks, free events, and premieres from artists around the world.
“The open call programs are fantastic this year,” says Irene Bindi, one of WNDX’s programming collective members. “We had such an explosion of submissions from all over the world, so we were really able to craft programs of what we felt were the best of the best.”
The three open call programs, made up of these submissions, feature artist premieres and works from Canada, Argentina, Thailand, the Philippines, Malaysia, New Zealand, and more. New Zealand artist Nova Paul will be visiting the festival, showing her own work as well as a program she put together of New Zealand films.
Canadian artist Christina Battle will also be showcasing her work at the festival. Her piece, The Twelve Devil’s Graveyards Around the World, is a mixed media installation, and won the Jury Prize as Best Canadian Work. Battle was inspired to create the piece after becoming engrossed in research on the Bermuda Triangle.
“I am really interested in unknown phenomena and especially [in] thinking about the line that separates scientific fact from fiction,” says Battle. Her work explores this separation, “the way we as a culture tend to believe some things over others.”
The Twelve Devil’s incorporates video of foggy northern Alberta scenery with more scientific elements from research on unexplained phenomena like the Bermuda Triangle by Ivan T. Sanderson, such as video loop of one of his maps and the archival magazine that first published his study.
“[These elements] were all included as a way to point towards his research and to create a space that at once feels ominous and strange while also seeming factual.”
Battle is also curating a selection of short films for the festival that explore the idea of “wandering through, across, and within.”
“I was looking for works that visualized more active relationships with the landscape, as opposed to just pointing a camera at a space and documenting it,” says Battle. “The result is a 45-minute program of short videos made by artists that I’ve come across during my many travels and wanders.”
The WNDX Festival will also be showcasing the work of one of Canada’s most revered experimental filmmakers, Michael Snow. Three programs of Snow’s work will be playing at Cinematheque on Sept. 27-29.
“He’s one of those artists whose work is interesting across the board, without exception,” says Irene Bindi, curator for the Snow programs, adding that it was difficult to choose which of Snow’s works to feature. “I wanted to show works that reflect the range of his explorations in film and that will also offer a totally unique experience to the audience.”
The works to be featured include Snow’s 1971 film, La Région Centrale, a piece Bindi characterizes as “still completely shocking.”
“The audience is inevitably going to have a physical experience that is unlike anything they’ve ever experienced in a movie theatre before. This work turns the entire viewing process on its ear, quite literally.”
The programs also comprise of five other works by Snow, which span his career from 1969 to 2005.
“He’s almost a scientist,” says Bindi. “Each of his works offers a new little window into a set of perceptual experiments.”
Snow will be in Winnipeg for the festival and will be at Plug In ICA on Saturday for a conversation with artist Dan Graham.
WNDX will be screening pieces from local Winnipeg filmmaker Scott Fitzpatrick. The festival will also be premiering films shot for the eighth year of Alex Rogalski’s One Take Super 8, a project where filmmakers are given a roll of Super 8 film to shoot a three-minute movie, and do not see the results until the night of the screening.
The full event calendar and more information can be found at www.wndx.org.
