Small File Media Festival 2025
Too Small to Fail!
The Small File Media Festival returns to the Cinematheque for our sixth year! Founded in 2020, SFMF raises awareness of the carbon impact of streaming media. The data centres, networks, and devices that store, compress and decompress, transmit, and play video contribute to a whopping 5% of global greenhouse gas emissions and this number is rising.
This year, our programming grows out of founder Laura Marks’ Guggenheim Fellowship, Small Files for a Small World. Small-file media thrive in places where electricity and Internet access are limited. Marks and members of our team trained media artists from Mexico City, Tehran, Dhaka, and Cairo in the arts of the small file. The films from these international workshops reflect on place through surprising aesthetics and moving storylines. Frame by frame, they take risks in both politics and art, showing that cinema doesn’t have to be big to be beautiful.
Come experience the Five Beauties of Small Files:
- Environmentalism! Natch.
- Creativity! At just 1.44 megabytes per minute, small-file films require creativity at every stage of pre-production, camera and app selection, performance, filming, and compression.
- Light tech! You can make a small-file movie with old devices, encouraging upcycling and saving money.
- Resilience! Small-file media function on precarious infrastructure.
- Discretion! Thanks to video compression, small-file movies protect insider information and invite interpretation.
Friday, October 17, 2025
Join us starting at 7pm for Opening Night! We will screen a program of International Small File shorts followed by a selection of Greatest Hits and Sleepers from the last five years of the festival. Cocktail reception to follow and a special announcement!
Saturday, October 18, 2025
Our festival continues on Saturday, October 18, celebrating over 60 cinematic jewels and the premiere of a feature film by SFMF 2024 Audience Award Winners, Liam and Will Riley. Talk back to follow with filmmakers in attendance. As always, the festival will stream online at smallfile.ca after the live events.
OFFICIAL SELECTION
The Blue Room: Waves of Veiled Revelations
Curated by Mena El Shazly & Radek Przedpełski · 58 min.
Wandering through tangled pixels, urban echoes, and velvety oneiric visions, “The Blue Room” opens a subliminal snowfield of opaque layers, spawning transmutation cycles and waves over waves of veiled messages. Silent, subtle and calm, this program eavesdrops on a conversation of ghost creeks, oscillating drones, and fast-disappearing gleams.
The Red Room: Particles of Love and Resistance
Curated by Mena El Shazly & Radek Przedpełski · 58 min.
Diving head-first into quantum dislocations and confronting us with critical visions of cities fractured by power, “The Red Room” is punctuated by particle eruptions, transmitting tectonic shifts and haunted reveries. Critical, abrasive, and outspoken, this program incites, spins, and shouts, spewing quantum chaos and puncturing clichés.
On Running and Hiding
65 min.
Directed by Liam Riley & Will Riley.
After meeting by happenstance, two troubled gig-working microinfluencers struggle to make it in Vancouver. Join us for the world premiere of this commissioned feature-length small-file film by directors Liam and Will Riley, 2024 SFMF Audience Award Winners. Talkback to follow with filmmakers in attendance.
Sleep Spells
Curated by Yani Kong & Joey Malbon · 54 min.
You enter a tiny forest, one of the last green refuges in an attempt to escape the 4K media dystopia. The din of modernity fades as you walk deeper into the trees, guided by tiny flickering lights. You come upon a clearing and a mage steps forth, placing you under a powerful spell. A reverie takes hold, the world becomes smaller, the lights become visions, and you are transported to the great world of small.
Prepare to be enchanted with “Sleep Spells,” a collection of hits and sleepers from the last five years of the festival. A cavalcade of crystalline gems encompassing all that is small: have you been sleeping on small files?
Compagnons du devoir
Curated by Joni Schinkel · 30 min.
Featuring a cohort of those nearest and dearest to the small-file spirit, this special program invites cherished allies and alumni to elevate ecomedia with ingenuity and purpose, screening experiments and original works that resonate far beyond their digital footprint. Keep an eye on smallfile.ca and @smallfile as we tease the lineup this fall.
PARTNERS
The 2025 Small File Media Festival continues our partnership with our future-forward friends at VIVO Media Arts, the Cairo Video Festival, The Hmm (Amsterdam), CONNECT (Science Foundation Ireland Research Centre for Future Networks and Communications at Trinity College Dublin), and the Vancouver Public Library. We’re grateful to the Canada Council for the Arts, BC Arts Council, and Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
