the8fest 2025
Unprojectables 2025
Shot on film but unable to play on a film projector. Live for viewing on our website from Nov 28 – Dec 5 2025.
Placeholder is an attempt at holding it together in the face of absence; of a mother, of a memory, of something tangible. Hands holding rocks, hands gripping other hands. Images oscillate between dreams and recollection, distorted and transformed over time.
Antonio Arango | Shot on 9.5mm | 2024 | México | 6:06 min | 9.5 mm | 30fps
The game has had great relevance in the competitive sense of our capitalist society. This premise shapes the way we act and create meaning, not only in each individual but in the entire society worldwide.
This view confuses our perception of reality and the consequences of our actions; They connote their power structures and the desperation of certain actors to establish new rules of the game. War and genocide are appearances that we did not expect in this century, like the images of an extinct cinematographic format. Images of a menacing phantasm? or a resistance format that refuses to disappear?
Avian de Keizer | T4T | 2025 | USA | 3 min | Super8
T4T is a short Super 8 experimental film about trans love and the medical system.
Patrick Doyno | Dizzy Cavalry | 2025 | Canada | 1 min | 24fps
Dizzy Calvary is an experimental short film animated frame by frame under the camera. The 8mm reel becomes both subject and surface — reacting to and interacting with the moving images previously inscribed on it. The chaos of the battlefield disrupts the projection’s stability and clarity, blurring the line between medium and message.
Tessa Garland | Drift | 2025 | Belgium | 7 mins 25 seconds | Super8 | 24fps
Drift is shot on Super 8 film. The sequence captures a walk around a precarious, low-lying sandbank island, where fleeting observations come into focus only to vanish again. Rotations and cycles ebb and flow, while sea-worn, foraged objects suggest deeper meaning. Prehistoric-looking cacti dot the island, contributing to its otherworldly and surreal atmosphere.
Thank you to everyone who submitted and continues to support small-gauge film.
Past Events
the8fest 2025
Things are looking a little different this year — but as always, we’re here to celebrate small-gauge with you!
Full Programming for PROJECTABLES + UNPROJECTABLES
Friday, November 28 · 7–11 PM
Owls Club
847 Dovercourt Rd, Toronto, ON M6H 2X4
JC Culp — Burn Pile
Immersive Film Installation
Burn Pile invites viewers into an intimate encounter with transformation and release. Vintage Fisher-Price hand-cranked film viewers are mounted on sculpted wooden posts reminiscent of headstones. Inside each one, a single personal object burns—evidence from a decade-long process of self-examination and change tied to gender, memory, and self-image. Visitors control the motion, winding forward, reversing, or pausing each loop of film. Through these childlike devices, acts of private destruction become shared reflections—a meditation on identity, loss, and renewal.
Luis Macías — INSIDE-OUTSIDE-AROUND
Live Film Performance
“At that beautiful moment between reality and dreaming,
an incorporeal forest emerges from the darkness and light.
Dark, violent and self- assured, it shares its fears of
nature’s despair.
Luis Macías is an artist, filmmaker, and image-moving composer. His work explores the formal and spectral properties of the moving image through an investigation of the cinematographic device and the photochemical nature of film itself. Focused on experimental and procedural practices of analog image-making, his works in Super 8, 16 mm, 35 mm, and video are composed for projection, performance, or installation.
Closing out the night is DJ Batforlillies – be sure to stay and dance!
Saturday, November 29 · 5–9 PM
CineCycle
129 Spadina Ave., Toronto, ON M5A 1J7
5-6:30 PM – Selected Submission Programming
Followed by a moderated discussion with the filmmakers
Rennie Taylor | Cherry Blossoms | 2025 | Canada | 2 min | Super 8 | 24fps
In the spirit of the fleeting moment, this double channel view point choreographs a dance within the chaotic ritual of viewing cherry blossoms and the crowds visiting Toronto’s High Park.
Tetsuya Maruyama | Gira 2 | 2024 | Brazil | 3 min | Super 8 | 18fps
In 2024 on a sunny day, I went to stroll around on my bike, with two super 8 cameras. the result is this film.
Larissa Fan | Coming + Going | 2005 | Canada | 3 min | 8mm Unsplit | 24fps
A portrait of the energy of urban life in split-screen. “Coming + Going” was shot on standard 8 film, with all editing and split-screen effects done in-camera. It is played first forwards and then backwards.
Callon Murphy | Tactile Light Diary | 2025 | Canada | 6 min | 8mm | 16fps
Touch replicated through audiovisual means.
Fabric structures exposed and magnified.
Textiles dance over microphone and screen.
Images burst to the forefront.
First a beach, then an unclean pool.
Summer slips into fall.
Details are forgotten or misremembered.
The retained memory of tactile objects.
8mm film presented with an asynchronous soundtrack.
Hogan Seidel | in the streets of june | 2025 | USA | 4 min | Super 8 | 24fps
Layered in the grain of Super 8, in the streets of june captures the vivid contradictions of a Seattle Pride parade: a kaleidoscope of joy and resistance, fractured and reframed through layers of multiple exposure. The film’s textured imagery merges the vibrant defiance of the parade with the imposing presence of police lines, their shadows cast across the glitter-strewn streets.
Scenes of dancers and banners dissolve into one another, overlapping with sharp flashes of riot gear, creating a haunting interplay between celebration and surveillance. The camera lingers on fleeting moments while the weight of unseen power hovers, ever present.
k.Schreier | Supermarkt | 2024 | Germany | 4 min | Super 8 | 18 fps
Super 8 found footage from the early 1970s – from the era of the big gluttony and consumerism in West Germany – illustrates the title song’s criticism of consumer society.
The song goes like this:
Go to your supermarket !
Where ? To your supermarket – baby !
Go to your building society savings !
Where are we goin’ ? To the building society savings !
B-u-i-l-d-i-n-S-o-c-i-e-t-y-S-a-v-i-n-g-s BABY !
S-u-p-e-r-m-a-r-k-e-t BABY !
Oh man, I’m not interested in that… So what are you interested in ?
…I’m interested in my building society savings and in my supermarkt !
Sandy McLennan | Seasonal Selfies | 2025 | Canada | 5 min | 8mm | 18fps
Summer and winter film fun with a mirror (no smoke), audio recordings of the featured Bolex B8 camera and a bit of river sound to boot.
Stefanie Weberhofer | von Pisten und Maschinen | 2023 | Austria | 3 min | Super 8 | 18fps
Part of the series In Bewegung / In Movement — fourteen Super 8 films exploring climate change in the Austrian Alps.
Miglė Križinauskaitė | Does the Sea Have a Heart? | 2025 | Lithuania | 7 min | Super 8 | 24fps
A poetic essay, an ode to the sea, which has no human figure at its centre, but only traces in the sand, echoes, and presence through absence. It is through this absence that the essence of the human spirit is best revealed. As Kahlil Gibran wrote: “There must be something strangely sacred in salt. It is in our tears and in the sea.”
7-8:15 PM – Home Movie History Project
A fan favourite! As always, we’re closing out the festival with the beloved Home History Movie Project.
FROM THE WARD TO BUCK LAKE
Toronto’s original Chinatown through to the 70s counterculture scene
presented by the Home Movie History Project
In the mid 1950s a couple with young children start to film their life in the north end of the city. Long before the existence of a ‘multicultural’ Toronto, they had succeeded in gaining a share in the prosperous postwar years. These gains they had made despite being directly affected and marked by the Chinese Exclusion Act and the many other barriers then still facing non-Anglos.
Their films start out capturing much of the typical subjects seen in middle class home movies but also show specific scenes of Asian Canadian life — the family business in the Ward neighbourhood (location of the original Chinatown), and the wedding of friends in the community.
As their kids grew older, their eldest son picked up the family movie camera and began to document the city, his friends, and the emerging counterculture. He recorded these subjects in unedited reels that are somewhere between home movies and art film traditions.
The couple captured in their films: the Santa Claus parade, hula hoops, 50s pleated skirts and women’s hats, kids wrestling, tobogganing, and a Lion Dance on Dundas. Then the next generation observed everything from teenaged boys pretending to smoke, to a music ‘happening’ in a tipi at Buck Lake.