Presented by la lumière collective and proposed by co-director Emma Roufs, DIFFRACTION is an experimental cinema program that invites viewers to discover the work of six Montreal-based artists who constantly question their relationship with the moving image. In the first part, viewers discover six short 16mm films by Samy Benammar, Charles-André Coderre, Emma Roufs, Malena Szlam, Benjamin R.Taylor and Erin Weisgerber. The films offer a sensitive, visceral, photochemical and analog experience, in which we find life through film, and film as an integral part of life. By foregrounding nature and the body, this program emphasizes the material gestures of creation on photochemical film. This 30-minute film programme is followed by MORAINE, a 30-minute live cinema performance by Erin Weisgerber (of Jerusalem in My Heart) accompanied by an electronic soundtrack composed by SUUNS drummer Liam O’Neil.
Program:
Dans les cieux et sur la terre | Erin Weisgerber
2022 | 16mm | color-b&w | sound | 12 mins
Vertiginous masses of carved limestone give way to an ecstasy of light and living colour through an alchemical spell of transformation. Hierarchies dissolve as the transient quotidian inspires the monumental. Shot and hand-processed entirely on 16mm reversal films, with all of the composite images created in-camera, a foundational Montreal monument meets fleeting traces of urban flora.
kauaʻi ʻōʻō | Samy Benammar
2023 | Super 8 to 16mm | color | sound | 3 mins
In 2000, the International Union for Conservation of Nature officially declared the Kauai Oʻō extinct. All that remains of this endemic bird of the Hawaiian island of the same name is the recording of its singing by ornithologist David Boynton. Between territories and treetops, I’m still looking for a trace of the vanished birds.
Lunar Almanac | Malena Szlam
2013 | 16mm | color | silent | 4 mins
Lunar Almanac traces the observational points of the lunar cycle in a series of visual notations. Using single-frame and long-exposure photography, the unaltered, in-camera editing accumulates over 4000 layered field views of half-moons, new moons, and full moons. These lunar inscriptions flit across the screen with a frenetic energy, illuminating nocturnal reveries that pull at the tides as much as our dreams.
spring rebirth at Source du Pêcher | Emma Roufs
2024 | Super 8 > 16mm | sound | 1 min 40
Window on the fleeing memory.
A Film About A Man Of A Certain Age | Benjamin R. Taylor
2023 | 16mm | b&w | sound | 5 mins 30
Unmade Film No. 1
Fractures chimiques ON/OFF | Charles-André Coderre & Mathieu Arsenault
2024 | 16mm | color-b&w | sound | 6 mins
Fractures Chimiques ON / OFF combines the real-time 16mm projections of artist-director Charles-André Coderre with the modular synthesizers of sound artist Mathieu Arsenault. The luminous information is captured on the screen and retransmitted to the synthesizers to generate a sound universe drawn from the image itself, provoking an unprecedented form of dance between these two media. The interaction between sound and image created by this device offers a sensory experience in which each photogram becomes a musical note, and vice versa.
PERFORMANCE MORAINE | 30 minutes
From ice blue chasms, through jagged mountain vistas, to the roaring Athabasca waterfalls, MORAINE is a live cinema performance that follows the course of glacier meltwater from its source to the river systems it feeds. After years away, Weisgerber returned to her home province of Alberta, Canada to film the oil refineries seen from her childhood home, the pumpjacks and traces of the petroleum industry written across her memory and the province’s landscape, and to document the effects of climate change on the Columbia Icefield and the lands its waters feed.
Shot on a 16mm hand-crank camera, hand-processed, and printed by the artist across multiple film stocks in a collective darkroom, this close-to-the-heart material bears the mark of the filmmaker’s hand.
Accompanied by an electronic soundtrack of subtly evolving rhythmic patterns composed by SUUNS drummer Liam O’Neil, Weisgerber forges a tight audio-visual experience as she performs live manipulations across four 16mm projectors and an ever-evolving series of handmade film loops.
Dates:
WORM (Rotterdam, P-B)
05.11.2025
L’Etna (Montreuil, FR)
07.11.2025
Atelier MTK / le 102 (Grenoble, FR)
10.11.2025
Dodeskaden (Marseille, FR)
11.11.2025
Alternativa Festival(Barcelone, ESP)
14.11.2025
