Small File Media Festival 2024

Still from Liquid Snake Dance (2024) by Ioannis Karalis

Celebrate the Fifth Annual Small File Media Festival In-Person and Online

October 17 – 19, 2024
The Cinematheque, Vancouver

Online Festival
Streaming Sustainably October 21 – 27, 2024
2024.smallfile.ca

Saving the world, one pixel at a time!

It’s the Small File Media Festival’s fifth anniversary! Since 2020, we’ve been raising awareness about the environmental impact of streaming media. Streaming comprises a significant chunk of the world’s digital carbon footprint, but consumers continue to stream all kinds of media in high definition—video chat, high-resolution online games, Tik Toks, Reels, and energy-sucking AI “utopias.”

We challenge media makers to intervene in the 4K dystopia of bandwidth imperialism by creating original small file movies of any length, proving once again that small files are the sustainable cinematic avant-garde. Watching small file media together on a big screen brings the democratic potential of cinema into the digital age by showcasing artworks made with eco-friendly practices, affordable equipment, and minimal processing time. Small file creators use ingenious techniques to make these tiny movies beautiful and effective.

Still from Wormhole, Oct 11, 2022 (2024) by Stefan Smulovitz

Opening Celebration
Thursday, October 17 at 7:00pm

Join us on October 17 for our anniversary party and opening celebration at The Lido (518 E. Broadway), featuring the premier screening of Wormhole, October 11, 2022 by Vancouver composer and media artist Stefan Smulovitz, and followed by dancing courtesy of guest DJs Ian Prentice and Grey Paul of Dandelion Records.

Entry by suggested donation of $5 at the door.

Still from Rockstar_reduced (2012-24) by Julie Andreyev

Series 1
Friday, October 18 at 7:00pm

Never Gonna Fall for (Modern Love)
Curated by Joey Malbon
Twelve short films open the festival, starting with a frustrated keystroke execution extracting an endless feed of stray thoughts, entrenched narratives, and analogue connections that stretch out before collapsing into infinity. The number 18 is sent to hell. A sledgehammer of a metaphor breaks the mirror as we consume compartmentalized versions of ourselves. A hand touches a screen in a mediated attempt at navigating resilience in fraught times.

Its Tail, Placed in Its Own Mouth
Curated by Yani Kong
The ouroboros, biting its tail, transforms its body into a continuous flow that moves from strength to erosion, yet continuously returns to its own beginning. This selection of films explores methods that sustain by way of one’s own endlessly regenerating body, inviting cycles of renewal and rebirth.

Series 2
Saturday, October 19 at 11:00am

A Crystal That Extends Endlessly Within
Curated by Radek Przedpełski
Krzysztof Zanussi’s The Structure of Crystal (1969) staged a reunion between two scientist friends as an oscillation between two faces of a crystal: opaque and transparent, finite and infinite, molecular and cosmic, science and philosophy, cold pragmatism and affective poetics, the city and the country. In 1976, a group of Sudanese conceptualists—in their visionary ​“Crystalist Manifesto”—saw reality as ​“a crystal that extends endlessly within.” Films selected for this program share both Zanussi’s and the Crystalists’ intuition, foregrounding procedural operations between different orders of magnitude while endlessly crystallizing surfaces and framing devices as forms of life.

The Spectre Is the Future
Curated by Joni Schinkel
The films in this series are hazy diaries and fragmented pixel-visions, a collection of personal and political dispatches that linger like spectral remnants from another life. They reveal presents haunted by memory, shaped by what has been lost and what never came to be.

Series 3
Saturday, October 19 at 2:00pm

Spacetime Revolution
Curated by Mena El Shazly
These works are memories migrating in cyclical harmony with the sun. Drifting off into space but longing for the earth, these films evoke peripheral visions, sacred distortions, and supernatural intimacies of the everyday.

App 666
Inspired by Wim Wenders’s Room 666, this collaborative project asks 17 filmmakers about the current state of cinema. Selfie-style confessionals explore divides in the contemporary media landscape—from the powerful small-scale images presently emerging from Gaza to the distorted escapism of Hollywood blockbusters—and ask whether there is still a place for independent filmmaking.

App 666 will be followed by a Q&A with filmmakers William Brown, Jill Daniels, and Wayne Wapeemukwa, moderated by Laura U. Marks.

We’ll announce the winner of the coveted Small File Golden Mini Bear during Saturday’s award ceremony at 4pm.

As always, the festival will stream sustainably at 2024.smallfile.ca October 21 – 27. Check our site for ticket info.

Still from Simulacra Trinary: Derezzed (2021) by Lainh Hrafn

Looping Public Program
October 1 – 31, 2024 on the Mount Pleasant Community Art Screen

Surfacing
Curated by Joni Schinkel
Head to the outdoor Mount Pleasant Community Art Screen for a taste of the substance and the spirit of this year’s Small File Media Festival: dissolution and liquefaction as processes that breathe life into the static image. These transmutations carry our relationships to ecology, water, and our very body through the moving-image medium unimpeded by ethe of waning environmental optimism.

The Mount Pleasant Community Art Screen (intersection of Broadway & Kingsway in Vancouver) is an outdoor urban screen located on unceded Coast Salish territories, in the Mount Pleasant neighbourhood of Vancouver, BC, Canada. The screen reflects its neighbourhood through artwork by local and commissioned artists, with a special focus on works exploring the area’s history, its current vitality and its future, presenting a diverse range of visual and media art by dozens of artists, community members, and community festivals.

Festival Partners
The 2024 Small File Media Festival continues our partnership with our future-forward friends at VIVO Media Arts, the Cairo Video Festival, The Hmm Amsterdam, and the Beta Festival, Ireland. We’re most grateful to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Canada Council for the Arts, BC Arts Council, and SFU School for the Contemporary Arts.

Small File Media Society
www.smallfile.ca
info@smallfile.ca
Instagram @smallfile

The Cinematheque
1131 Howe Street
Vancouver, BC
Canada V6Z 2L7

Accessibility:
The Cinematheque is fully accessible. For more information, visit here.