Experiment continues

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This article was published 01/10/2025 (295 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

When it happened for the first time in 2006, the WNDX Festival of Moving Image was an open-ended hypothesis, and even those most dedicated to its success had their doubts.

“We didn’t know what was going to happen, and only in doing it did we really understand how many times it could have catastrophically failed,” says artistic director Cecilia Araneda, who co-founded the festival with Solomon Nagler.

But it was in that grey zone of possibility and limit-testing, that both the festival and its filmmakers soon thrived —establishing WNDX as a cornerstone event with an international reputation for showcasing a dizzying variety of off-centre, outre and avant-garde work by both emerging and established creators.

As the festival’s porcelain anniversary edition begins tonight, the results are conclusive: WNDX offers replicable proof of its own staying power in the experimental film sphere.

“The reason we wanted to start was because there was a lot happening in the film community centred on a certain film history that emerged in the ‘70s, ‘80s and into the early ‘90s as well,” says Araneda, a filmmaker who served as the Winnipeg Film Group’s executive director from 2006 to 2017.

“What emerged after that was almost unknown territory.”

A key exponent of exploring that unknown was Jaimz Asmundson, the late Cinematheque programmer who helped shape WNDX’s programming throughout the 2010s.

“He became a dominant force for the festival. He was just an amazingly talented person,” says Araneda.

To open this year’s festival, Araneda has programmed an 85-minute retrospective of Asmundson’s films, including 2011’s The Magus and 2015’s Echoes, each an exploration of the filmmaker’s parents.

Also featured in the program are several shorts lensed by Asmundson for WNDX’s One Take Super 8 event. The Asmundson retrospective screens at 7 p.m. tonight at the Gas Station Arts Centre ($15).

Asmundson’s Dash Jam, still in progress at the time of his death in 2024, will have its première on Sunday night at Video Pool’s Output venue as the festival’s closing event.

For the One Take, participants are given a cartridge of Super 8 film to shoot a short film in a single take, without cuts or splices. Originally conceived of by Regina film programmer Alexander Rogalski, the event has been a key part of WNDX since 2006, says Araneda.

This year’s event features 22 new shorts from filmmakers including Coby Friesen, Faustina Dalmacio, Emily Labby, Kris Snowbird, Alan WH Wong and Ian Bawa (Gas Station, Thursday, 7 p.m., $10).

Bawa is one of 20 filmmakers whose work will be shown during Thursday’s One Take Retrospective, curated by Rogolski (Gas Station, 9 p.m., $5). The local director’s 2019 short Strong Son — now in development as a feature film — was an official selection at the Toronto International Film Festival, the Gimli International Film Festival and the FascinAsian Festival, among others.

On Saturday afternoon, in a program curated by Jenny Western, two decades of Indigenous filmmaking from the Prairies will screen at the Rachel Browne Theatre (1 p.m., $5), including works by Jackie Traverse (Two Scoops), James Dixon (Nikâwiy (Mother), JJ Neepin (Bayline), Darryl Nepinak (Indian) and Leonard Sumner (Mikomiing).

That collection is followed by Land’s End, a Prairie retrospective featuring work by Carole O’Brien, Mike Maryniuk and Matthew Rankin, Shawna Dempsey, Lorri Millan and Tracey Traeger, Guy Maddin, Mahlet Cuff and Sean Garrity (3 p.m., $5).

A full program can be found at wndx.org.

ben.waldman@freepress.mb.ca