Come see the select works being showcased in the Yukon Energy Community Gallery during the Available Light Film Festival until February 20.
EVENING ESCAPADES
DIR. DARCY TARA MCDIARMID & CHANTAL ROUSSEAU, 2024, YUKON | 4 MIN | ANIMATION
An adventurous rabbit undertakes an enchanted evening escapade through a mysterious forest trail. The rabbit encounters dreaming wolves, and other mischievous animals as he navigates a midnight mushroom garden. Evening Escapades is a combination of animated elements and Super 8 footage that was shot in and around Ddhäl Ch’èl Cha Nän / Tombstone Territorial Park in Tr’ondëk Hwëtch’in territory in the Yukon and then processed with plants harvested from the land.
IN MY HEAD
DIR. IRENA TEMPEA, 2024, CANADA | 6 MIN | ANIMATION, DOCUMENTARY, EXPERIMENTAL
In My Head is an experimental first-person short film. It deals with the multiple sclerosis that has affected the filmmaker for over eight years: “Through my magnetic resonance images, my cervical slices and jerky sounds, everyday life unfolds. Life goes on. I’m fine, I’m not so fine.” Today, this sprawling disease is the subject of a film that aims to get closer to the people who suffer from it. It aims to portray them through a lens that is close to their reality. This film-diary is part mourning, part sweetness.
BLUSHING PHANTOM
DIR. ERΨN TEMP3ST, 2022, CANADA, | 9 MIN | EXPERIMENTAL
Blushing Phantom is a short experimental film that explores disappearance and camouflage in virtual spaces. It seamlessly blends dance and digital animation, culminating in a maximal collage of bodies, flowers, eyes, and butterflies and gesturing toward the iconography of divinity and online .gifs.
THIS IS NOT A GIF (CECI N’EST PAS UN GIF)
DIR. JULES RONFARD, 2023, QUEBEC | 5 MIN| ESSAY, AVANT-GARDE
In the form of a video-poem, ”Ceci n’est pas un GIF” is a breach, a short object that questions our relationship to the real and digital world, to our physical presence on Earth.
TEXADA
DIR. JOSEPHINE ANDERSON AND CLAIRE SANFORD, 2023, CANADA | 17 MIN | SEATED ROOM-SCALE VR, COMBINED WITH STEREOSCOPIC 360-DEGREE VIDEO
How big is time?
On the remote Canadian island of Texada, the everyday stuff of human existence—work, play and dreams—is juxtaposed against the tectonic shifts of the planet, rising and falling in cyclical patterns of creation, extinction and renewal.
In this impressionistic VR project, co-directors Claire Sanford and Josephine Anderson merge 360-degree live-action footage, captured across the island, with 3D animation of geologic upheaval to create an immersive, poetic experience. A chorus of residents’ voices ebbs and flows, unravelling the complexities of the surrounding limestone that is central to the community and economy of the island. Present in everything from toothpaste to the great Pyramids of Egypt, this humble yet ubiquitous rock is a critical element in the construction of our modern society.
Texada is about rocks, people and time—the head-spinning vastness of terrestrial epochs contrasted with the immediacy of day-to-day human experience. Real and imagined landscapes document a journey from the Earth’s formation to the current moment: twinned streams of existence mixing and mingling in an ever-changing flow. As geologic forces continue to unfold, the only constant is transformation. Yet amongst the great heave of history, glimpses of temporal beauty, like discovering beautiful stones on a beach, help us understand our place in the universe.
