A Prairie Syntax: A Feminist Mapping of Canadian Prairie Filmmaking
Curated by Cecilia Araneda, for the WNDX Festival of Moving Image
Screening in Kolkata, India as part of the EMAMI ART Experimental Film Festival, Sept 11-14, 2025
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 Cinema 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, curator
A Prairie Syntax: A Feminist Mapping of Canadian Prairie Cinema
Program duration: 66 mins
Threshold
dir: Freya Björg Olafson (Canada) – 5:25, 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.
Revival
dir: Heidi Phillips (Canada) – 8:20, 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.
Party Mix for One
dir: Liz Garlicki (Canada) – 3:09, 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.
Time Away
dir: Carole O’Brien (Canada) – 7:00, 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 1900’s, into an inner, meditative road trip accompanied by three female guides, away from time and towards the transformative end of the road.
Tudor Village
dir: Rhayne Vermette (Canada) – 5:15, 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.
DISILLUSIONED
dir: Jane McCreight (Canada) – 5:30, 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.
Leaky Rad and the Studio Visit
dir: Nicole Shimonek (Canada) – 1:00, 2020
Leaky Rad and the Studio Visit is a video work featuring the artist Nicole Shimoek 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.
IKWÉ
dir: Caroline Monnet (Canada) – 4:45, 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.
Water once ruled
dir: Christina Battle (Canada) – 6:14, 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.
Congress
dir: Kyath Battie (Canada) – 4:02, 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.
Tuktuit
dir: Lindsay McIntyre (Canada) – 15:00, 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.