September 24 - November 15, 2026
Presented by Werklund Centre
FREE FILM EXHIBITION 
Location: Werklund Centre

This selection of experimental short films is part of the 2026 Calgary International Film Festival programme. The selected works exist beyond traditional storytelling and use a variety of methods, such as photo-chemical emulsions, abstract improvised dance, and an extremely involved photographic process blending analog and digital methods.

This programme gathers experimental works that push past traditional storytelling into more physical, process-driven forms of cinema. In these works, image-making becomes inseparable from the body: hands in the darkroom, hands reworking archival material, and hands in motion.

Fine Black Frame is a kinetic self-portrait exploring Blackness. It is a collaboration with writer/performer Thomas Antony Olajide, adapted from his co-created play Black Boys, published by Playwrights Canada Press, and directed by emerging Canadian actor and filmmaker Leah Doz. Taking inspiration from Jean-Michel Basquiat's self-portraits, Fine Black Frame is a manifesto, a one-man performance shot in-studio, with spoken-word text and soundscape merged with entirely improvised movement, born from prompts and collaborative discussion between director and performer.

Fireflies is a student film directed by Noah Shin. The short features a ghostly, haunting tension between the familiar and the unfamiliar, finding a strangeness in recognizable experiences that was always there but never quite visible. It was made through a careful process that included modeling and animating in Blender, as well as printing 3,000 rendered frames onto paper. Each physical frame was then backlit with a digital image on an iPad and rephotographed in a darkroom, capturing only the light transmitted through the paper itself.

Black Seas directed by Tiohtià:ke/Montreal-based artist Erin Weisgerber offers images that exist between figuration and abstraction. Created as much in the darkroom and at the projector as in the camera, it offers subjective portraits of place and history through architecture, landscape, and the human body, using excerpts from films by Alexander Sokurov and Irakli Kvirikadze, stories of migration, shifting borders, and unstable identities. This film was part of the Karlovy Vary experimental programme.

THE FILMS

FINE BLACK FRAME (dir. Leah Doz)

One man explores and defies the definitions of Blackness, Queerness, and masculinity in a kinetic self-portrait.

Leah Doz is a Canadian filmmaker and actor, originally from Edmonton. Her first auteur short, Strangers, won the Grand Jury Prize and Future of Film is Female Prize at the 2025 Nitehawk Shorts Festival. A graduate of the National Theatre School of Canada, Leah co-developed the story and co-starred in Grace Glowicki’s acclaimed 2025 Sundance and SXSW feature, Dead Lover. Upcoming directorial projects include Party of One (short), Best Wishes (micro-feature), and her first full-length feature, in development. Fine Black Frame is a collaboration with writer/performer Thomas Antony Olajide, adapted from his co-created play, Black Boys, published by Playwrights Canada Press.

Instagram: @dozleah

BLACK SEAS (dir. Erin Weisgerber)

Ghostly figures are conjured from a mist of crumbling film emulsion, while flickers of familiar melody emerge amidst a sea of resonance and static.

Erin Weisgerber is a Tiohtià:ke/Montreal-based artist working with photo-chemical film to produce installations, performances, and short films. She manipulates the photographic, chemical, and material properties of film to transform the world framed through her camera, rendering moving images that exist between figuration and abstraction, external vision and internal landscape. Weisgerber's pieces play in the complicated relationship between the cinematographic image and the pro-filmic world, and emphasize time, rhythm, and haptic experience. Created as much in the darkroom and the projector as in the camera, they offer subjective portraits of place and history through architecture, landscape, and the human body.

Instagram: @erin_weisgerber_film

FIREFLIES (DIR. NOAH SHIN)

In the blue hour between day and night, a quiet neighborhood is visited by fireflies and ghostly lights.

Noah Shin is a filmmaker and a rising sophomore at Yale University. He is interested in telling stories that unify visual style and thematic vision to produce images that are inseparable from their production process. His work lives in the tension between the familiar and the unfamiliar, finding strangeness in recognizable experiences that was always there but never quite visible.

Instagram: @imnoah.shin