SOFIE PARSONS, UNITED KINGDOM
Youth Category

to float

to hover on the waters edge

neither sinking nor swimming

to float you have to remain calm

buoyant

not be dragged under or relentlessly powering forward

Float is a short film made possible by Falmouth universities AMATA Edge Award.

Film still featuring Yixuan Kwek

ALL BODIES DANCE PROJECT, CANADA
Emerging Category

Originally created as a live, site-specific performance, Sanctuary is a dance re-imagined for the camera. The film features two bodies searching for calm inside the sounds and sights of an urban landscape. Harmanie and Rianne ask the question inside and outside their bodies: how can we create a sanctuary for an embodied experience in a public space? How does dance and embodiment change this public scene? And how are our bodies affected by the public gaze and by one another?

An audio-described version of Sanctuary will also play as part of the Monday screening.

Artists: Harmanie Rose, Rianne Svelnis, Martin Borden

KAYLEE LOUIE, CANADA
Youth Category

A short film featuring the duality of a single dancer and a lonely egg. With dance movement being inspired by the mild sufferings we find in our everyday lives, co-directors Josh Lam and Kaylee Louie pair up to showcase the unusual relationship between a moving body in turmoil to an egg that is being tossed, flipped, fried, and sometimes forgotten.

LISA & JUJU KUSANAGI (KUSANAGI SISTERS), JAPAN
Emerging Category

According to research, there are 9 different types of intelligence: naturalistic, musical, logical-mathematical, existential, interpersonal, bodily-kinesthetic, linguistic, intrapersonal, and spatial. Kusanagi Sisters question alternative types of intelligence not previously defined.

CRYSTAL STAR FINN-DUNN, CANADA
Youth Category

House Wives is our non-domesticated play on the traditional housewife using our street style House dance. What is it that happens when four women come together for a house party?

Artists: Ria Aikat, Crystal Finn-Dunn, Diana Iaboni, Karyin Qiu, Kevin Kim

DANIELLE LONG, CANADA
Youth Category

A re-imagining of what formal can be, influenced by the absurdities we revel in throughout our childhood. As we grow older these instinctual actions of our youth may be deemed as unsophisticated outbursts or fade away entirely from being expressed. Indulge in the bizarre instincts of our innocence and do some sort of nothing for no particular reason. No one needs to know why we do it anyways.

ELLIE BISHOP, CANADA
Youth Category

Tuesday is a depiction of an unrelieved, suburban afternoon. It is different versions of the same people. It is the release of pent up energy with nowhere to go, nothing to do. Throughout creation we continuously made plans only to break them, experimenting with riffing off of each other and our space in unruly ways. We played with non-linear timelines, and the idea of being inconsequential to the outside world while being fully consumed by our own.

Artists: Ellie Bishop, Valeria Perez, Patricio Cartas

DAVIDE DE LILLIS, GERMANY
Emerging Category

Dancing between waking and dreaming, a day seen through the eyes of eleven young residents of the Friendship Village in Vietnam who are living with disabilities caused by Agent Orange. As the film progresses we are welcomed ever deeper into their richly symbiotic world.

Artists: Davide De Lillis, Julia Metzger-Traber, Hương Đinh, Mai Ngô, Long Nguyễn, Long Cảnh, Đô Lê, Tuấn Vương, Hơn Vy, Thu ận Trần, Lệ Nguyễn, Hóa Bùi, Dung Hà

MIRJAM LEUTWILER, NEW ZEALAND
Youth Category

(E)MOTION is a documentary which focuses on the different aspects of competition and the effect it has on our mental health. The subjects of this film will talk about their mental health and their experiences with competition from both Gymnastic and Parkour perspectives. This documentary questions how we can find our way back to positive aspects of competition, grow resilient and leave behind anxiety and free ourselves from trying to outcompete each other and ourselves.

JASMINE LIAW, CANADA
Youth Category

Exploring a physical reliance and dependency within a collective environment, the first section of the film suggests that the dancers' relationship progresses through extended time and borrowed trust. Later countering each other's weight and creating independent choices that transform their energy into a rhythm state of movement, this piece animates the evolution of alliance between dependencies within ourselves and in comparison to others.

Film still of Rachelle Ashmore, Jasmine Liaw, Shayla Dyble by Jennifer Robichaud

KIMBERLY HO, CANADA
Youth Category

Seemingly quotidian, there's more than meets the eye. Dumpling skin without filling is like a coin with only one side. It's everything and nothing. It's that thought on the tip of your tongue, forever receding from sight. Dumpling / 餃子 is a visual mediation on how we hold two distinct things in tandem, to fully inhabit two seemingly opposite spaces. Is this the quintessential Asian diasporic experience? Is duality the difficult gift we are offered?

Artists: Kimberly Ho, Christian Jones

SHON KIM, UNITED STATES
Emerging Category

BOOKANIMA, a compounding of the words ‘book’ and ‘anima’, is an Experimental Animation to give new cinematic life to the book. It aims to create ‘Book Cinema’ in the space between Book and Cinema by Chronophotography Animation, paying homage to Edward Muybridge and Entienne Jules-Marey.

It examines the locomotion of Dance along with its stream: Ballet-Korean dance-Modern dance-Jazz dance-Aerial Silk-Tap dance-Aerobic-Disco-Break dance-Hip hop-Social dance.

CORINA ANDRIAN, UNITED KINGDOM
Youth Category

A soup made of souls melting in a gloomy afternoon, rekindling innocent connections through play. Is childhood the safest place where you can revisit memories? What happened when you broke a bowl for the first time as a kid?

TAMAR TABORI, CANADA
Youth Category

As isolation slowly but surely became the new normal, I found my creative process in a state of limbo. Creating content in any capacity felt forced, foreign, and fake. I looked for inspiration in things I had immediate access to: my old school journals. Filled with quotes and ideas shared by various professors and fellow students, I began to extract those specifically talking about and relating to "The Creative Process". Taken out of context, I began to find comic relief in the quotes, linking the words to make a sort of inner dialogue an artist may have.

ANYA SAUGSTAD, CANADA
Youth Category

A Wednesday night process on 16mm.

Artists: Anya Saugstad, Micah Henry, Stefan Nazarevich, Patrick Macht

MARÍA FERNANDA ROSAS VELASCO, MÉXICO
Emerging Category

A series of phenomena is caused when a group of workers moves among the artificial mountains.

Ciudad Montaña explores the process and components of deconstruction of the environment through the manipulation and displacement of artifacts and matter. This scenic work embodies forms of perception of the atmosphere we inhabit, it is the collective search for rhythms that influence the projection of space.

SAFA ALI MUDEI, CANADA
Youth Category

In Islam, there’s a belief that when a person dies and has been put to rest in the grave, their soul gets separated from their physical body and goes into another realm where they are put through many trials of blessings or punishments; depending on what they did in their mortal life. This realm is called Barzakh. It is the Islamic version of purgatory. Follow the soul as they endure their own version of Barzakh.

Artists: Safa Ali and Katrina Castro

KIN NGUIEN, CANADA
Youth Category

LUCID is a dance narrative of a broken soul searching for the way out of the darkness and depression. The character encounters her anxieties and fears and eventually finds the strength to stand up for herself.

Artists: Kin Nguien & Katrina Castro

AUDREY BUCHANAN, UNITED STATES
Emerging Category

In the short film, The Mystery of Now, artist and Apache Skateboards founder, Douglas Miles shares socio-political context around the history that lead to life on the San Carlos Apache reservation, and the personal history of how and why he started a skateboard brand and team of local youth leaders. His advice on cultivating resilience, creativity, and joy, provides guidance in a time that for many feels uncertain, polarizing and divisive in our living rooms and around our dinner tables.

LORELAI WILLIAMS, IN PARTNERSHIP WITH VINES FESTIVAL
Emerging Category

The Butterflies in Spirit are a dance group of family members of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls who represent their missing and murdered loved ones. In this piece they dance to two songs - Burn Your Village to the Ground and Sisterz. The first part of the piece is contemporary which are the spirits of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls. The second part is the hip-hop piece which shows that we’re still here, we’re still strong, and here we are right now. The third piece is the traditional piece where we represent our different nations from across Canada.

BO DYP, IN PARTNERSHIP WITH VINES FESTIVAL
Youth Category

Bo Dyp, a Musgamagw Dzawada’enuxw artist, dances to their elder, George Johnson's story. The story of how their ancestors came to this land - the story of four brothers and their father.

CORINNE LANGMUIR & ERIN LUM, VANCOUVER
Commissioned Artists, Youth Category

Zi Ji [zìjǐ, 自己], meaning ‘Self’ in Mandarin, is an introspective dance short depicting the ambiguous beauty of solitude. The film follows our protagonist as she navigates an intimately distant relationship with numbness. She is pushed into a period of self-reflection felt as bleak, lonely, and permanent, yet through emotional exploration the feeling of permanence wavers. This harrowing journey demands more of her than she has to offer. Surrendering, she comes to find loneliness is natural and solitude is man-made.

She is purely nowhere.

KARMELLA CEN BENEDITO DE BARROS & LEXI MELLISH MINGO, VANCOUVER
Commissioned Artists, Youth Category

Where We Meet is an experimental film exploring the Black femme body and its relationship to space through conscious movement on the unceded and unsurrendered territories of the Tsleil-Waututh, Squamish, and Musqueam people.

The story follows our protagonist as they navigate isolation and seek a sense of belonging in a conflicting and new environment. Drawing on themes of double consciousness and experimental embodiment, this story explores the relationship between Blackness and the environment in which this concept exists.

Drawing from community dialogue to address the filmmakers own subjective relationship to public space as mixed race Black identifying people, this film intends to hold space for diverse experiences of Blackness in so called "Vancouver". In times where racial politics exist in every crevice of society, the filmmakers escape temporal confines by decolonizing our situated experience, delving into the untold past, dreamy memories and future imaginings.

SASHA J. LANGFORD, VANCOUVER
Commissioned Artist, Emerging Category

Looking upon Science World from Habitat Island brings together an intersection of Vancouver's two defining mega-events from a single location. While both Expo 86 and the 2010 Olympics are popularly remembered for their contributions such as the Skytrain and Olympic Village, fundamental to the new visual environments produced by these events were the imposition of coercive mass evictions of low-income residents. Intervening within the conventions of tourist photography--a visual form produced for and by such mega-events--and with a tone between performative satire and realist documentary, Habitat 86 reflects upon Vancouver's legacies of urban displacement at the level of intimate embodiment.

KENDRA EPIK, VANCOUVER
Commissioned Artist, Youth Category

Sunglow Gecko is an exploration of introspection and an attempt to piece together fleeting moments of uncertainty. It is trying to understand what it feels like to learn something new for the first time. To make our own conclusions about objects that have already been claimed. As we search to find a shade of a colour that perfectly fits, what else will we discover? Does a conclusion reveal everything about yourself that you need to know? Maybe we already know what this is supposed to be like, but maybe we can decide for ourselves. Colour, shape, light, and texture tell a story that has been told many times, but it will be new. Nothing is certain, everything is certain. If we start again from the beginning, will everything pan out the same?

TALIA WOODLAND & GERMAIN CARTER, TORONTO
Commissioned Artists, Youth Category

INTIMATE AGGRESSION is the process of revealing your true self in a world where conformity is best. By way of natural movement, a story of understanding, freedom, and evolution is unveiled.

SIMRAN SACHAR, VANCOUVER
Commissioned Artist, Youth Category

A movement film about sexual abuse and rape and the haunting aftermath that take place inside and outside of a woman’s body. LUNACY explores the expectations, and image placed upon young women and their innocence versus what society really wants from this innocence. The aftermath contains how this experience shaped Simran's movement. From Simran's experiences, she brings you LUNACY from the very depth of the most honest corner of her heart.