Small File Media Festival brings experimental shorts to the big screen
The Cinematheque program proves that digital filmmaking has a future beyond artificial intelligence
On Running and Hiding / You Hide in Hope
Small File Media Festival takes place at The Cinematheque October 17 to 18
YOU WANT TO TAKE a big bite out of AI? Here’s one thing you can do: visit The Cinematheque October 17 to 18 for this year’s Small File Media Festival, which assembles a spectacular program of experimental shorts—and one feature-length title—all handmade by humans using tech ranging from iPhones to toy video cameras. The sole caveat? Everything is created at less than 1.44 megabytes per minute, or the carrying capacity of an old floppy disk.
Experimental and avant-garde film and video have always made a virtue of technical limitation, but the Small File Media Festival introduces a new and important kind of rigour. Specifically: a strict mindfulness about energy consumption. This is a celebration of low-carbon filmmaking at a time of avaricious resource use in streaming media and, in particular, the growing assault on our world by AI.
Chelsea Birks
“That was a major motivation for starting the festival,” explains The Cinematheque’s learning and outreach director Chelsea Birks. “During COVID everyone was getting into AI and in the beginning there were questions about, how will this affect the environment? As the fest has expanded we’ve had to really look at the submissions and ask, are these AI-created? So it’s also supposed to be a reaction against AI technology that still embraces the digital, showing that there’s a way forward with digital that isn’t this hyper-consuming exploitative AI tech.”
Following its inception by SFU prof Laura Marks in 2020, the Small File Media Society opened workshops in cities around the world including Mexico City, Tehran, Dhaka, Cairo, “and notably Vancouver”. This year’s festival opens with Birks’s favourite short, made at The Cinematheque itself. “A Creek at Spanish Banks” by Thomas Evdokimoff runs four minutes and comes in at a mere 5.97 MB. How on earth do these barely substantial artifacts translate to the big screen?
“We’re leaning into the small-file aesthetic and not trying to cover it over,” answers Birks. “Obviously these films don’t look 4K and compression is usually seen as a bad thing, like something that you want to minimize or avoid. The best of these films use compression to create artistic images, so lots of big pixels, colours, the way the the image flattens becomes artistic in itself.”
Worth mention here is that some contemporary filmmakers, notably David Lynch and David Cronenberg, both enthusiastically explored the digital image in later works, rather than masquerading the tech as film.
“Lars Von Trier is another one,” adds Birks, who first encountered the Small File Media Festival in its original run at SFU. She was blown away. “I hadn’t seen anything that engaged with digitality in quite this way. I really liked the contrast in watching videos on the big screen because they became really cinematic to me.”
In turn, with the growth of the festival, filmmakers are thinking about large-scale exhibition “so now there’s a bit more play between that big screen/small screen distinction. They use the bigness of the pixels in a cinematic way.”
It’s certainly notable that, after two solid programs of animation, low-yield CGI, short narratives, non-narratives, docs, and more, this year’s festival ends with an 85-minute feature. (File size? An incredible 95 MBs!) On Running and Hiding / You Hide in Hope was commissioned by the SFMF from twin brothers Liam and Will Riley, two UBC film graduates who were prizewinners at last year’s festival with “A Story of Snow”. Birks hasn’t seen the finished product yet—it’ll be hot off the laptop when the film debuts at 2 pm on October 18. “It’ll be a story,” she laughs. “That’s all I know!”
Meanwhile, for newcomers, she eagerly recommends the pocket-sized Compagnons du devoir, a 43-minute program also screening on October 18 featuring “a few of our favourites from past festivals but also new works from artists we often feature who love small file. I think every file on that list is fantastic. I think it’s going to be a barnburner.” Readers should be reminded that Birks refers to a metaphorical barnburner, with a carbon footprint approaching zero. 
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