TIDAL SURGES #3
Dive into the wild and unpredictable currents of contemporary cinema. This series of short films showcases local artists who bend form, fracture narrative, and push the boundaries of image and sound to create bold, thought-provoking works that ripple far beyond the screen.
diario de verano
anivides - Cristal Buemi and Francisca Duran | 2025 | 4m
diario de verano is an exploration of flora in Tkaronto and Kanadario . Abstract movement and the physical, compositional properties of foraged materials, strengthened our community/kinship to the land and each other. Gathering rituals, stop motion animation and phytograms, were used to create layers of ourselves intertwined through our latinx identities
anivides is the interweaving experimental works of multidisciplinary artists Cristal Buemi and Francisca Duran focusing on analog and digital frame-by-frame approaches to showcase their abstract, study and practices. Exploring the idea of weight on our structures due to environments, experiences and their direct relations to trauma, healing and transformation. With a focus on collages of bodily works both in human and plant forms from a diasporic immigrant, bipoc, femme, queer and intergenerational perspective.
Goin' Down The Road
Brian R Donnelly | 2024 | 4m
Goin’ Down The Road is a psychogeographic meander through Toronto using popular movies to propel the narrative forward. Relying on films’ inherent unfaithfulness to geography, a few dialogue cues, and a great deal of coincidence, scenes from disparate films intersect and redirect each other to follow geographic patterns. What emerges is a disjointed document that captures the growth of a city over several decades, distilling a small amount of truth from a growing library of fiction.
Brian R Donnelly (b. 1979) is an artist motivated by mischief. He tests boundaries to see what new and unexpected outcomes arise from misusing media. His recent work includes found footage, recontextualized to shift focus from foreground narrative to background geography. Positioned somewhere between piracy and cartography, this work distills truth from fiction by misinterpreting the language of film. Transcending time and logic, urban landscapes are redrawn, exposing archives of disguised municipal identity.
what if we kept it between us?
Mahlet Cuff | 2026 | 5m
A single channel film that draws from archival footage of ballroom, voguing, juke, footwerk, dancehall and dance practices across the African and Black Queer diaspora. While drawing from House music godfather Frankie Knuckles who oftentimes was asked what is house music, the question is proposed to the audience, questioning why there is desire to explain the genre at all. Using music from electronic duo Drexciya, what if we kept it between us? is working towards recentering genres of Black music that have been appropriated.Pushing against extraction and offering gatekeeping as a way to protect and preserve Black music and dance ethnographies.
Mahlet Cuff is a multidisciplinary artist, curator, writer, filmmaker, film programmer, DJ, sound artist, community organizer and arts cultural worker based in Winnipeg Manitoba (Treaty 1). Through an ethnographic based practice they are interested in themes of memory and erasure in order to make sense of the Black Queer diasporic communities they are a part of and engage with. By using Black feminist citational praxis and interrogating their own personal familial archives, they create reimagined Black Queer Diasporic dance and music histories by visually and sonically collaging moving images and sound. Cuff’s work has been screened and exhibited in Winnipeg, Toronto, Windsor, New York, Paris and Brazil. Their video piece titled UTOPIA (an ode to the past, present and future) was shortlisted for the 2025 FluxusMuseum Prize for Experimental Video.
No Job Too Big Or Too Small
Gary MacLeod and Rob Elliott | 2026 | 3m
This film revisits Gary MacLeod’s lifelong obsession with drawing and the trucks that passed his father’s gas station. According to a popular saying: the whole world moves by truck; Gary’s drawings expand this notion into flights of fancy. Gary’s truck drawings on 3”x5” filing cards, which date from 1970 until today, overflow with callbacks to comic book action, surrealism and pop art. Gary has tapped fellow artist Rob Elliott to animate the trucks first seen in his 1987 chapbook Orpheus Truck.
Gary MacLeod is a multimedia artist and stylistic nomad whose work incorporates illuminated signs, installation, photography, video and street interventions.
His work has been seen at Propeller, Art in Transit, Figment Festival, Nuit Blanche, Images Festival, Harbourfront Centre,The Power Plant and Chromazone.
His street sign stickers have been spotted in Toronto, Miami, Montreal, Paris, London, New York, Shanghai and Costa Rica.
MacLeod has a B.F.A. from Mount Allison University. He has extensive experience in the entertainment Industry and has been conducting training workshops since 1999.
Rob Elliott creates paintings, illustrations, and multimedia projects under the moniker Swizzle Studio. Elliott has participated fulsomely with NAC over his 15+ years as a member, including STRUTT contributions, a main space gallery installation, and several multi-artist projects including Randy & Friends, Puppet-A-Go-Go, and MNFF. He is also an amateur birdwatcher and plays accordion in a weird cover band.
Gary MacLeod and Rob Elliott have collaborated on three previous short films: Open Flowers (Images Festival, 2010), Night Thing (Too Tuff For The TTC Festival, 2012), Anger Due To (Art in Transit festival, 2014).
The Last Assignment
Sydney Taylor | 2026 | 5m
Based on a dream by DOP and co-writer Luke Germann. This short explores how it sometimes feels being an art student. The stress, the hard work, and the odd characters you meet along the way. The Last Assignment is aptly named, as it was Sydney and her crew's last assignment in the Winter 2026 term. The film had to feature an amnesia patient, a prop book, and the line “Now that I’ve seen this, this changes everything”. As well as being in the style of a cinematic movement studied during the term. Arthouse was the chosen style. As everyone in the crew thought it would represent the film's core themes the best.
Sydney Taylor is an aspiring filmmaker from St. Catharines. She developed a passion for film in high school, and is currently attending Niagara College for film production. Her goal is to create weird, dark, eccentric films that intrigue viewers.
Tech Talk
Adam Wiebe | 2026 | 6m
Inspired by old tech shows like Bits & Bytes as well as the charm of independent passion projects, this work questions our relationship with the artistic media we use. A tech show host has allowed his passion for technology to become dulled by burnout, losing the respect he once had for something he once loved. His responses are dry and disconnected from what's being said to him, resulting in his interviewee – a camera – becoming more desperate and resentful. The film follows the resulting existential crisis the camera faces, leading it to lament over its lack of independence and say things it doesn't mean. Distinguishing parts of the film into different styles through audio/visual effects leans into the technological theme and reflects the mood of the subject: ultimately guiding it to a better, happier place.
Born in St. Catharines Ontario, Adam Wiebe received his Honours BA in fine arts from Brock University in 2026. His practice pulls from many artistic practices, but audio/video practices are a fundamental part of it. Working primarily on short form and music videos, his video practice is centred around rotoscope animation and a generous use of visual effects programmed in Touchdesigner. He has exhibited digital media in several exhibitions at Brock University making use of audio recorded at a field recording workshop at NAISA in South River, Ontario.
Rabid Beach
Jesi Jordan | 2025 | 2m
Rabid Beach is a psychedelic music video for hardcore band Pig Pen. Crafted from roughly 600 hand-painted animation frames, this animation was created spontaneously and led by intuition, it unfolds as a vivid, ever-evolving journey in constant motion.
Jesi Jordan is a self-taught traditional animator and experimental film maker. Her work comes from the perspective of an un-institutionalized artist, where she uses automatism and metamorphosis as tools for surreal and abstract storytelling. Through her art, she explores themes such as the psyche, the body, and the relationship to self.
Fools Rush in
Xander R. Serpa | 2026 | 24m
A Mime named Marcel works a bland office job in a world of clowns, feeling lost and alone everything changes when a new girl shows up at the office the two quickly form a friendship with Marcel quickly catching feelings, the story follows as he tries to come to grips with these new feelings and to finally say how he feels.
Xander R. Serpa is an aspiring film maker and a fresh graduate of Niagara college, who hopes to share his vision of the world around him with others