Thursday, October 17

OPENING PARTY — 7:00PM

Join us for our five year anniversary party and opening celebration at The Lido (518 E. Broadway), featuring the premiere screening of Wormhole, October 11, 2022 by Vancouver composer and media artist Stefan Smulovitz and a performance by Stefan and XEL. A dance party will follow, with guest DJs Ian Prentice and Grey Paul of Dandelion Records! Tickets will be available at the door for a suggested donation of $5.

Friday, October 18

SERIES 1 — 7:00PM

Never Gonna Fall for (Modern Love)

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.

Curated by Joey Malbon
49 minutes

Its Tail, Placed in Its Own Mouth

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.

Curated by Dr. Yani Kong
51 minutes

Saturday, October 19

SERIES 2 — 11:00AM

A Crystal That Extends Endlessly Within

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.

Curated by Radek Przedpełski
43 minutes

The Spectre Is the Future

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.

Curated by Joni Schinkel
54 minutes

SERIES 3 — 2:00PM

Spacetime Revolution

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.

Curated by Mena El Shazly
49 minutes

App 666

42 minutes
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 William Brown, Jill Daniels, and Will Wapeemukwa. Moderated by Dr. Laura U. Marks.

AWARDS CEREMONY — 4:30PM

All attendees, filmmakers, and guests of the Small File Media Festival are invited to our final celebration where we will award the coveted Small File Golden Mini Bear and other bespoke prizes!
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Free admission will be on a first-come, first-served basis starting at 4:00 pm.

October 1-31, 2024

MOUNT PLEASANT SCREEN

We're excited to partner with the outdoor Mount Pleasant Community Art Screen - located intersection of Broadway & Kingsway in Vancouver - for a special looping program throughout the month of October! MPCAS is an outdoor urban screen that reflects its neighbourhood through artwork by local and commissioned artists, presenting a diverse range of visual and media art by dozens of artists, community members, and community festivals.

Surfacing

A sample of the substance and spirit of this year’s Small File Media Festival, this program elevates 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 a moving-image medium characterized by eco-optimism.

Curated by Joni Schinkel
69 minutes

The Fifth Annual

SMALL FILE MEDIA FESTIVAL

October 18—19, 2024

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 on demand, video chat, video conferencing, high-resolution online games, TikToks, Instagram Reels, and energy-sucking AI “utopias.”
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Our festival challenges 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. How small is a small-file movie? No more than 1.44 megabytes per minute, the storage size of a floppy disk. Small-file creators use ingenious techniques to make these tiny movies beautiful and effective.
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Join us Thursday, October 17 at 7:00 pm for our anniversary party and opening celebration at The Lido (518 E. Broadway). Our festival continues October 18 and 19 at The Cinematheque with 60 films by local and international filmmakers, with artists in attendance for post-screening discussions. At Saturday’s award ceremony we’ll announce the winner of the coveted Small File Golden Mini Bear and other bespoke awards! As always, the festival will stream online here after the live events.

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, Beta Festival, and ReIssue. We’re most grateful to the Canada Council for the Arts, BC Arts Council, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and SFU School for the Contemporary Arts.

5^th Small File Media Festival

ONLINE EDITION

October 21—27, 2024

All programs from this year’s Small File Media Festival will stream sustainably online in glorious low-resolution!

These movies are small in file size, but huge in impact: by embracing the aesthetics of compression and low resolution (glitchiness, noise, pixelation), they are the new experimental film movement in the digital age. This year, seven lovingly curated programs plus tasty extras traverse brooding pixelated landscapes, textural paradises, and crystalline infinities - all in the comfort of your home!

We have created a bespoke small-file player designed to sustainably stream the films at their native resolution, as the artists intended. Very small! With no ties to BIG STREAMING, our online festival owes nothing to Vimeo, YouTube, or any other bandwidth imperialist.

BUY ONLINE PASS

We have three tiers for accessing the festival. All passes provide attendees access to full online programming.

$25 CAD - Friend of the Festival
Do you believe in small-files? We do too! Please help us sustain the Small File Media Festival for years to come with the generous Friend of the Festival pass for a donation of your choosing, minimum of $25.

$15 CAD - Lo-Barrier Pass
Want to support small-files but are on a strict budget? No problem, the Lo-Barrier Pass pass allows you full entry to the festival. Perfect for students!

$? - NOTAFLOF
No One Turned Away For Lack Of Funds! If you are unable to purchase a festival pass and want the full small-file experience, we have you covered. Send us an email to info@smallfile.ca and we will send you a unique code to access our festival’s player.

Small File Media in Stages of Siege and Infrastructural Precarity

TACTICAL MEDIA PANEL

October 21 — 11:00AM PST

Presented in partnership with Cineworks.

This web panel, hosted by our friends at Cineworks at 11am PST on October 21, 2024, will discuss small-file media in states of siege and infrastructural precarity, expanding on David Garcia and Geert Lovink's notion of "tactical media" and Laura U. Marks' notion of the "Arab glitch." Our invited speakers consider issues in disseminating media in current zones of conflict where internet infrastructures can be itinerant and bandwidth fluctuates, techniques of media art and activism that respond to states of siege, the possibilities for small-file media in such contexts, and the potential for collaboration between independent artists and researchers around the world.

Panelists include filmmakers Mehvish Rather and Francesca DiBona, documentarists based in Canada and focused on zones of political conflict, artists and filmmakers Nasri Sayegh in Lebanon and Yuri Yefanov in Ukraine, and media scholar Mohammad Zaki Rezwan in Bangladesh. The panel will be moderated by visual artist/scholar Dr. Radek Przedpełski from Trinity College Dublin.

JOIN THE CALL