Land’s End: A Canadian Prairie Retrospective
Curated by Cecilia Araneda, for the WNDX Festival of Moving Image
★ Screening Sat Oct 3 at 3 PM – Rachel Browne Theatre
The Canadian prairie landscape is like no other; land’s end seems visible before you, and yet remains perpetually unreachable. This illusion is created by the curvature of the Earth, laid bare by the flatness of the prairie terrain. Sifting through two decades of WNDX prairie cinema programming to assemble this program became a similar experience – every time I neared what I thought was a certain end point, the pathway extended before me. In truth, it’s not possible to encapsulate twenty years of programming history in one program. Land’s End is instead a collection of short films by prairie artists that speak to individual moments in regional experimental cinema and video art history, and reflects the spirit of emergence. This program also includes films that WNDX did not program in the past, but which reflect aesthetic thresholds. Buckle up for a ride towards an unreachable horizon.
Land’s End: A Canadian Prairie Retrospective
Program duration: 60 mins
Time Away
Carole O’Brien | Manitoba / Quebec
7:00 mins, digital file, 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.
Odyssée de fer (au Haut-Canada)
Stéphane Oystryk | Manitoba
3:27 min, digital file, 2014
Created for the WNDX One Take Super 8 Event, Odyssée de fer (au Haut-Canada) chronicles a VIA Rail train trip through the wilds of Ontario.
Dead Meat
Clark Ferguson | Saskatchewan / Quebec
11:11 mins, digital file, 2008
Dead Meat is an absurd experimental narrative video that follows a young man’s travels into the desert while under-going an epiphanic, transformative moment. The journey is representative of a cliché rites of passage journey that has been born into our shared pop-cultural identities.
Cattle Call
Mike Maryniuk, Matthew Rankin | Manitoba / Quebec
3:30 mins, digital file, 2008
Cattle Call is a high-speed animated documentary about the art of livestock auctioneering, structured around the mesmerizing talents of 2007 Man-Sask Auctioneer Champion, Tim Dowler. The film uses a variety of animation techniques, including stop-motion, cut-outs, open-exposures, hole-punching and rubbing lettraset directly onto the physical film.
We’re Talking Vulva
Shawna Dempsey & Lorri Millan, Tracey Traeger | Manitoba
5:15 mins, digital file, 1990
A gleeful wear-and-care manual for female genitalia.
Praying Mantis Upskirt
Allison Bile, Jenny Bisch | Manitoba
2:15 mins, digital file, 2007
A band of insects wreak havoc over the prairies and silly praying mantis can’t seem to keep up.
why some people be mad at me sometimes
Mahlet Cuff | Manitoba
2:40 mins, digital file, 2024
A meditation on the misappropriation of Dancehall music while using Black Feminist Citational praxis.
living with it
Sean Garrity | Manitoba
2:40 mins, digital file, 2003
A woman lives with the echoes of trauma, and life becomes about just trying to get through the day. living with it has been made with hand-processed and hand-painted 16 mm film; starring Yumi Sakamoto.
Parallax
Jean-Pierre Marchant | Alberta / Ontario
2:54 mins, digital file, 2018
Parallax is about stripping away all ornamentation and capturing unmoving landscapes over time. The film was shot on Vision3 50D super8 film and hand processed.
Sinclair
Guy Maddin | Manitoba
3:52, digital file, 2010
Part of the Hauntings I installation, Sinclair evokes the real-life story of Brian Sinclair, an Indigenous man who died in a Winnipeg hospital waiting room in 2008 after having waited 34 hours for care. Not an official film, but rather designed as a lost fragment, the work’s style is inspired by Michael Snow’s landmark 1971 film, La Région Centrale.
Treaty Number Three
Danielle Sturk | Manitoba
4:15 mins, digital file, 2013
A video portrait of renowned artist Rebecca Belmore, 2013 Laureate of the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts. The filmmaker collaborated with Belmore, who created a new visual art/performance artwork specifically for this video.
Water once ruled
Christina Battle | Alberta
6:14 mins, digital file, 2018
Water once ruled collapses the past, present and future. 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.
700 Days
Jessie Ray Short | Saskatchewan
2:32 mins, digital file, 2018
How long before the dream of health returns? Will it ever come back?