Small File Media Festival 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.”
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.
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.
OFFICIAL SELECTION
Never Gonna Fall for (Modern Love)
Curated by Curated by Joey Malbon · 49 Minutes
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. —Joey Malbon
It's tail, placed in it's own mouth
Curated by Curated by Yani Kong · 51 Minutes
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. —Yani Kong
A crystal that extends endlessly within
Curated by Curated by Radek Przedpełski · 43 Minutes
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. —Radek Przedpełski
The Spectre is the Future
Curated by Curated by Joni Schinkel · 54 Minutes
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. —Joni Schinkel
Spacetime Revolution
Curated by Curated by Mena El Shazly · 49 Minutes
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. —Mena El Shazly
App 666
Curated by Curated by Laura U. Marks · 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 was followed by a Q&A with William Brown and featured filmmakers Jill Daniels, and Wayne Wapeemukwa.
PROGRAMS & EVENTS
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Small File Closing Ceremony
October 19, 2024
The Cinematheque, Vancouver, BC -
Beta Festival Screening
November 3, 2024
Beta Festival, Dublin, Ireland -
Festival Pre-Party
October 17, 2024
The Lido -
Mount Pleasant Community Art Screening
October 1 - 31, 2024
Kingsway at Broadway, Vancouver, BC
PARTNERS
The Small File Media Festival grows out of the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada, on unceded territory of the –Sḵwxw̱ ú7mesh (Squamish), Stó:lō and Səlío lwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) and xwməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam) nations. We are grateful for support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The Small File Media Festival is forever grateful for its home at The Cinematheque.
