WNDX Festival of Moving Image

Based in Winnipeg, the WNDX Festival of Moving Image is a five-day experimental film festival lovingly cared for by Winnipeg and Prairie-region filmmakers and curators since 2005.

WNDX supports a diverse community of experimental moving image artists through its annual Festival and year-round activities which bring local, national and international filmmakers together with audiences, providing them with access to new work at the forefront of experimental cinema.

All events will take place at the Dave Barber Cinematheque, the Black Lodge (the Winnipeg Film Group’s 3rd-floor Artspace Studio), or the Manitoba Museum Auditorium.

Festival highlights this year include:

For the first time in 4 years, all – all events in the five-day program are in person!

Opening Night Screening – Field Notes from a Rainy Day: The Animations, Meditations and One Takes of Leslie Supnet – curated by Cecilia Araneda. This 50 min. Program is the first-ever Manitoba retrospective for Supnet, a Winnipeg Filipinx animator and one of Manitoba’s most accomplished filmmakers, whose work has been selected by some of the most prestigious film festivals in the world, including Toronto International Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, and the Flaherty NYC. Reception to follow in Artspace lobby for all ticket holders.

Interdisciplinary performances by Anto(n) Astudillo and Freya Björg Olafson:
TRANS THE MIRROR (2024), Canadian Premiere.A 20-minute performance by Brooklyn-based Latinx artist and curator Anto(n) Astudillo, on what it feels like to inhabit a trans/queer body in a world that has rendered their bodies as vulnerable.
MÆ – Motion Aftereffect by Winnipeg’s own Freya Björg Olafson (20 min, 2019) are digital collages of motion-capture data (both found online and uniquely generated); ready-made and custom 3D models alongside varied internet-sourced monologues.

I Use to Live There (14 mins, 2023), by Winnipeg-born, Montreal-based Ryan McKenna, Manitoba premiere. Blending documentary-style filmmaking with fictional elements, the film stars Daniel Gerson and Monika Schneider as semi-fictionalized versions of themselves and focuses on the relationship between a photographer who is losing his vision due to a degenerative eye disease and the actress who hired him to take her new headshots. The film was selected as part of the TIFF’s 2023 Canada’s TOP TEN list and screened at Locarno International Film Festival, Festival du Nouveau Cinéma, and DOXA (among others)

Terra Long’s’ feature documentary Feet in Water, Head on Fire (90 mins, 2023), Prairie Region premiere. An invisible line connects California to parts of the Middle East and North Africa, where similar climates provide ideal growing conditions for date palm trees. Using textural 16mm, Long surveys the arid California landscape along the San Andreas Fault—from microscopic plant cells to macroscopic pans of the golden mountains—and zooms in on the lives of those whose livelihoods are dependent on the trees’ sweet fruits and the exoticism they lend the region. Programmed by Jaimz Asmundson, WNDX Festival Producer and Board Member, for over a decade until his untimely death in early 2024.

wndrland (50 min), 15 films from Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Quebec, Yukon, BC, Germany, Switzerland, Brazil, Italy/Netherlands, and Argentina. This program has been curated for film lovers of all ages who are interested in films that reside outside of the big-box movie theatres!

Back again – and always a filmmaker and audience fav – the One Take Super 8 Event. 5 participants are each given one roll of Super-8 film and a Super-8 camera to work with. The unedited results are revealed when the filmmakers see their work for the first time along with the audience!

Tickets for the opening night screening and reception are $10. Admission for all other screenings is pay-what-you-can ($5 recommended). Tickets are available for advance purchase at the Cinematheque, through WNDX’s website – https://wndx.org/festival-program/ – or at the door. The full schedule can be found here – www.wndx.org