The House Is a Hole
Thursday, June 5 | 7:00 PM | PG
new work by Dylan Bodner, Ryan Steel,
Ben Balcom, and Stéphanie Lagarde.
Four films explore the space between familiarity and disorder, public and private. The aftermath of a failed experiment in communal living and a haunted portrait of reno-viction confront the fragility of home with eerie resonance. A posthuman manifesto recited by a collective being urges us toward a psychedelic ego death. Elsewhere, two friends find private joy in a quasi-public space. An incantation to abolish private property, under the glow of an electric witching hour. The house is a precarious construct.
*This program is rated PG. Total runtime 58.5 minutes
#6 4098 Av. du Parc-La Fontaine, dir. Dylan Bodner
2025 | Canada | 17 | video | World premiere
Unable to secure an apartment in 2023, Juliana and I agreed to sublet in Montreal and signed a lease valid until January 2025. In August 2024, after coming under new ownership, the building informed us we had 30 days to permanently vacate the premises in order to perform renovations—despite the fact they'd never entered the apartment to perform an inspection. Powerless as sublettors, the person we were subletting from fought for us to stay until November 1st.
Fort Garry Lions Pool, dir. Ryan Steel
2024 | Canada | 6 | 16mm on video
Before I knew. When I could sense.
The Phalanx, dir. Ben Balcom
2025 | United States | 13.5 | 16mm on video | Canadian premiere
Letters from the Ceresco community trace the fragility of harmony, the dream of life in association, the frictions that give way to fracture. Members of the phalanx drift apart, lingering in private corners, suspended in speculative time.
Extra Life (and Decay), dir. Stéphanie Lagarde
2025 | France | 22 | video | Canadian premiere
A polyphonic narrator—filmmaker, parent, forest, insects, fungi, childcare worker—declare their absolute refusal of labor exploitation, and their necessity to join collective bodies in resistance.
Who ordered legibility? In an incantation to conjure authority, the film unfolds the connections between the inventions of nuclear families and managed forest plots as controllable normalized units of profitability. Extra Life (and Decay) celebrates hospitality as a survival tool to fight morbid politics of isolation. An ode to the multitude, the illegible, the unmeasurable.