April 6-8, 2023

Artifact Small Format Film Festival

Festival Hall, 1215 10 Ave. S.E.

Festival Schedule:

Thursday, April 6

Opening Night - Aaron Zeghers Retrospective
Aaron Zeghers is a Canadian filmmaker, based in rural Manitoba. Zeghers works primarily as an experimental and non-fiction filmmaker, utilizing found images and histories, analog formats and obsolete technologies. His form-bending documentaries and expanded cinema performances blend the formally experimental with the intimately personal.
7:00 p.m.

Friday, April 7
Program: Accessibility in Analogue This program will start off with the premiere of Super 8 work created by disabled filmmakers with the National accessArts Center. After intermission, the program will feature short analog works from around the world which related to accessibility. Q & A with filmmakers to follow the program.

7:00 p.m.

Saturday, April 8

Program: Optical Illusions Persistence of vision is the original optical illusion at the heart of cinema. Tonight’s program engages your visual perception with ambiguities, distortions, paradoxes, and fictions, all heightened by their existence as celluloid artifacts. Q & A with several of the filmmakers to follow the program.

7:00 p.m.

Tickets:
General Admission: $10 each night

The Artifact Small-Format Film Festival is an annual 3-day film festival, screening exclusively Super8 and 16mm film. Formerly the $100 Film Festival, they are now in their 28th year of celebrating celluloid film! They are among the select few that continue to keep this unique medium alive and to draw celluloid lovers to Calgary each year.
In early 2020, they had to cancel the 28th festival due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Finally, 3 years later, we are able to safely meet in person to celebrate film shot and projected on film! The show will feature themed shorts programmes of Super 8 and 16mm films from around the world. Each screening will have a 15-minute intermission and will be followed by a Q&A with filmmakers.
This year, welcome Visiting Artist Aaron Zeghers! Aaron will be presenting a retrospective of his filmography, as well as an Artist Talk (time TBA).
The Artifact Small Format Film Festival is Calgary’s only celluloid-based film festival. When the $100 Film Festival was born in 1992, it showcased eight short films on Super 8. The name sprung from the challenge to shoot a short film on four rolls of Super 8 – which tallied to the cost of $100. In following years, the festival dropped the budgetary limit and allowed 16 mm film, which shifted the focus from low budget to quality small-format films. Thus, the name was changed to the Artifact Small Format Film Festival in 2017 so as to better represent the festival's role as an an international celebration of creative story telling on celluloid.

Over the years, Artifact has expanded to include the popular Film/Music Explosion!, commission projects, and various partnerships. Artifact is one of only a handful of festivals worldwide that exhibit exclusively on small-format celluloid. They are proud to be among the select few that continue to keep this unique medium alive, and to draw celluloid lovers to Calgary each year.