The Living Container
new work by
Olivia Norquay Kevin T. Allen Luciana Decker Orozco
Kara Ditte Hansen Angelo Madsen Jesse McLean
Saturday, June 6 | 2:00 PM
We are made and unmade by what passes through us: food, fantasy, memory, disease, and desire. Avenues to understanding are forged through consumption, metabolization, and decay, across six films that examine bodies and individuals as porous systems of relation. Liminal gaps open between the living and the dead, the past and the present, artificial and organic, known and unknown. If our fingerprints can contain our uniqueness, what of our entrails? Hear here, a song for the skin demon.
This program is rated 14A | Total runtime 59.5 minutes
softer, softest, dir. Olivia Norquay
2025 | Canada | 5 | super 8mm on video | Manitoban premiere
A skin flick
NECROPOLIS, dir. Kevin T. Allen
2025 | USA | 9 | super 8mm on video | World premiere
A Stone Tape film inspired by the yellow fever epidemic in 19th century New Orleans, using analog camera techniques and contact microphones to excavate the material traces of trauma.
Puro Andar - Language of the Entrails, dir. Luciana Decker Orozco
2025 | Bolivia | 13 | 16mm on video | Manitoban premiere
A journey into the underworld begins in our own entrails, which are formed by the flesh we consume, and the crumb balls softened and shaped by the saliva of mothers. This film explores the unfolding of time, from the intimate rhythm of digestion to the vast expanse of deep time—stalagmites forming over millennia, fossilized dinosaur tracks, and the echoes of primal expressions, akin to growling. Inspired by the Puro Andar chapter of Gamaliel Churata’s El Pez de Oro, where he says that "we all carry the dead alive; that the dead live”.
Living Containers, dir. Kara Ditte Hansen
2025 | Canada | 14.5 | 16mm on video | Manitoban premiere
In a world permeated by plastics, a bioengineer becomes consumed by a plastic‑eating enzyme she helped create. Aided by machine learning, the enzyme rapidly breaks down polymers so plastic can be recomposed anew. Insects, humans, models, and machines are caught in cycles of extraction, ingestion, and excretion, driven by an unconscious pull toward a pre‑life state of matter. Moving between microscopic vision and vast infrastructures, the film presents an ecosystemic leveling of species and materials.
My Structuralist Film, dir. Angelo Madsen
2026 | USA | 6.5 | video | Canadian premiere
How shall I cater best to your desire for me to be visible? Set up as a confessional-cum-guided meditation, My Structuralist Film uses performance artist Tehching Hsieh's One Year Performance (“Time Clock Piece”) as a framework to illustrate the filmmaker's (presumable) insides. How thoroughly should a trans body want or need to be visible? On what terms is the filmmaker obligated to narrativize, perform, or even fabricate visibility for the sake of an audience?
Placeholder, dir. Jesse McLean
2025 | USA | 12.5 | video | Canadian premiere
Amid a pandemic and a failing marriage, a woman retreats into obsessive fantasy. A film star becomes her companion as the boundaries between reality and reverie blur. Lost in a frozen Antarctic landscape inspired by Frank Hurley's 1914 Endurance expedition photographs, escapism becomes a mirror revealing how far she's drifted from herself.