Evacuating Empire
new work by
Adrian Flury Charles Cadkin
Amelia Mylvaganam Alee Peoples Lilli Carré
Friday, June 5 | 10:00 PM
I hear the system is collapsing, and it sounds like clattering bones. Through a tense navigation of failed history, fragmented digital archive, and emptied public space, a collection of work emerges that registers disorientation, disenchantment, and evacuation with panicked laughter. The uneasy recognition of continuity within breakdown is revealed, less a record than a residue. Everything lingers in transmission. We know a storm is coming; are you sure you have everything you need?
This program is rated 14A | Total runtime 62 minutes
Panic in Nowhere, dir. Adrian Flury
2026 | Switzerland | 26.5 | video | Canadian premiere
Drifting through videoclips online easily leaves you distracted, lost, and back on square one. Imagine, you found a series of clips organized by a sense of inchoate feeling of eclipse of time and end of the world, evoking a shared sense of fate.
Year Without a Summer, dir. Charles Cadkin
2026 | USA | 12.5 | video | World premiere
Across Illinois, eleven locations borrowed from elsewhere, among them Norway, Normandy, Lisbon, Ottawa, Peru, and Sandwich, form a fragmented landscape study tracing dissonance between Midwestern spaces and the histories embedded in their names. Ecological catastrophe, racial violence, failed harvests, and cultural displacement emerge through AI voiceover and synthetic image processes that destabilize the documentary image, raising questions of AI as an unreliable narrator in the historical record.
Hands, dir. Amelia Mylvaganam
2025 | USA / Canada | 4 | video | Canadian premiere
You are certain. You are changing. You are exactly the same.
Questions of coming of age posed and somewhat answered through a collage of digital memories and physical aspirations.
Slowest Smile, dir. Alee Peoples
2025 | USA | 11.5 | video + 16mm on video | Canadian premiere
Front row seat to a failing empire.
"We have nervous laughter because we want to make ourselves think what horrible thing we encountered [or caused] isn’t really as horrible as it appears, something we want [and need] to believe.” –V. S. Ramachandran
Evacuations, dir. Lilli Carré
2025 | USA | 7 | video | Manitoban premiere
In this cel-animation, painted formless figures haunt recent photos of empty public spaces, expressing a frantic energy felt in our current moment. They are displaced from their locations, as environments dissolve and their printed record evaporates.