Unholy Inheritance
guest curated by XINEMA
Friday, June 6 | 8:30 PM | 14A
films by Ayla Dmyterko, Sam Drake, Zack Parrinella, Heidi Phillips, Tetsuya Maruyama, Kasper Feyrer, and Gabi Dao & Lou Lou Sainsbury.
In the ruins of promise, radiant beings emerge through thick, tainted air. Across seven films, these profane figures assume the margins, forming new lineages and rejecting providence. They stray from recognition, bringing back to life what history has cast out: passerby and desert, ritual and refusal, affinity and aversion. What arrives here isn’t just alive, but ascendant.
*This program is rated 14A, and contains rapid movement and flashing light. Total runtime 50 minutes
XINEMA is a queer, genderqueer, and neurodivergent artist-led collective focusing on experimental, ecological, and low-barrier filmmaking. They currently operate between spaces and regions, with a home base at their new Norquay Park Fieldhouse lab space in Vancouver, BC. They facilitate screenings, workshops and related events, with a focus on local, wherever that may be. Their main priorities are to remain low-barrier, accepting free ongoing and unlimited submissions of any year or premiere status; prioritize underrepresented artists and media forms; and connect filmmakers and film-lovers of various backgrounds, disciplines and career levels.
https://xinema.ca
On Volya: Filling in the Frescoes, dir. Ayla Dmyterko
2023 | Canada | 10 | 16mm & video on video | Manitoban premiere
On Volya: Filling in the Frescoes is a poetic audio-video montage filmed in Scotland, where the prairie-born Ukrainian-Canadian artist is currently based; between the two worlds on which she meditates. It is a post-script to Kyiv Frescoes (1966) by filmmaker and artist Sergei Parajanov (1924-1990), which was cancelled for its pacifism, later recovered during the Soviet Thaw. Central to this work is the proto-slavic term: воля (volya): a lexical lacuna that describes the will and desire to exist beyond societal constructs; to be wildly emancipated.
Suspicions About the Hidden Realities of Air, dir. Sam Drake
2025 | United States | 9 | 16mm on video | Canadian premiere
Fragmented records reveal a concealed history of Cold War–era human radiation experiments, surfacing through a haze of manipulation and embedded studies. Desert dust settles into teeth, inscribing a residual record. Contaminated images conjure the unseen.
eyesore, dir. Zach Parrinella
2024 | United States | 6 | 16mm | Manitoban premiere
The rapid disassembly and reconfiguration of human forms commingles with concepts of external influences and power structures.
Revival, dir. Heidi Phillips
2009 | Canada | 8 | 16mm on video
Revival is a short 16mm experimental film about isolation, risk and rescue. The film is derived from super 8 films I found while thrift store shopping in Montreal. Watching them I was most drawn to the images of helicopters and the barren landscapes. I reprinted the imagery using various darkroom techniques and hand processed the results. Throughout the process I found myself surprised with the results time and time again, which motivated me to experiment even further.
Antfilm, dir. Tetsuya Maruyama
2021 | Japan | 3.5 | super 8mm | Manitoban premiere
How can you go against the system when you are part of it?
New Pedestrians, dir. Kasper Feyrer
2018 | Canada | 4 | 16mm on video | Manitoban premiere
In New Pedestrians, “background actors” silently inhabit the roles of pedestrian or passersby. Casually strolling through their process of ontological becoming with every step, like an exercise in walking meditation, the pedestrians trace a path that is unstable, full of distractions, thoughts and emotions, crises of identity, anxiety and restlessness.
xxxxxxxxx xx xx x xxxxxxxx, dirs. mosquito girlfriend (Gabi Dao &
Lou Lou Sainsbury)
2025 | Canada / UK | 9.5 | 16mm on video | preview screening
xxxxxxxxx xx xx x xxxxxxxx is an experimental 16mm film exploring forms of sanctuary amidst ongoing crisis. As scenes of haunting pervade the mountain cave of Mary Magdalene and an extracted quarry, a trio of vampires facilitates the transition of a new host, reimagining passages of life & death, gender and parasitism within an age of extinction. Embracing tropes of eco-horror and exploitation cinema, a sensorial score by John Brennan and Elisa Ferrari drives us through the erotic desire paths of the vampiric; where water, blood, hormones and stone remain transformative, viral, abundant and alive.