Sunday, April 26 | 4:15pm | OKCMOA | 415 Couch Dr | FREE ADMISSION
Program 6:
Last Words
refrigerator hum, directed by Jade Wong
WOEFF 2026 ends with a set of films that contemplate breaks and endings, some temporary and some permanent. These films grapple with loss and absence and reckon with images of the gone and destroyed. In all of these considerations of endings, we have a program full of films that contain contradictions that complicate our understanding of basic, fundamental concepts. These films avoid cliches and instead dig deep into familiar and unfamiliar ideas.
And yet, this program’s films do not wallow in fatalism. In some films, like The Four Columns, directed by Dominick Rivers, the images themselves are falling apart and decomposing, but as their own negation becomes the images for us on screen, we can’thelp but wonder— are we watching a destruction, or a resurrection? Is there a beginning to be found somewhere among these endings?
Two films deal directly with bodies’ need for rest: Resistance Meditation, directed by Sara Wylie, and Resting Place, directed by Brittany Appleby. Here, the idea of a stoppage is attached to two meanings. On the one hand, stopping means missing, being away, interruption. On the other, stopping is the necessary means of recharging, a potential source of power. These filmmakers rework images of rest to take ownership of them, just as other films in this program embed meaning specifically into the imagistic, as in Afterimage, directed by Cara Fairchild, Strange Radiance, directed by Lauren Dake, and Traces with Elikem, directed by Ariana Gerstein.
Finally, we end this program, and WOEFF 2026, with refrigerator hum, directed by Jade Wong, as a moment to reflect on the entire festival weekend. At the end of refrigerator hum, Wong shows the film itself to her grandmother, who clearly bristles at the abstracted nature of the film, its narrative and its images. “It has to have a purpose,” she says, and we find ourselves instinctively defending Wong and her film from this accusation of pointlessness, though Wong herself does not offer much argument.
The film ends with Wong agreeing to turn her grandmother’s TV on for her as respite from this film itself. This can offer a challenge for us all as we wait until next year’s WOEFF programs: do we embrace the banality of routine for the sake of comfort, or do we opt in to challenging, thought-provoking, and perhaps even perplexing experiences of experimental art? Like the background noise of a humming refrigerator, the meanings and impact of avant-garde film are all around us, we just have to tune ourselves in to notice.
-Billy Palumbo, Festival Director
Strange Radiance, directed by Lauren Dake
Resistance Meditation
directed by Sara Wylie
A meditation on crip time and resistance by a chronically ill filmmaker, shot on Super 8 and (mostly) eco-processed by hand. The work addresses conventional narratives around the nature of illness and instead posits disability and crip time as natural sites of resistance against capitalism.
River of Days
directed by Mark Street
Using hundreds of transparent photographic stills animated on a lightbox and abstract Super-8 footage, the film meditates on the illusory nature of the passage of time.
nearer to thee in a triptych
directed by Matt Whitman
Structured as a devotional triptych, this film reflects on inhabiting a house filled with belongings left behind by deceased family members. Through close studies of organic remnants gathered from the surrounding landscape and veiled domestic spaces, it sits with the tension between care, avoidance, preservation, and the impossibility of return.
Strange Radiance
directed by Lauren Dake
Romance, obsession, fantasy, peril and rage. Strange Radiance is a short film which collages home movies of American families on 16mm with a french experimental film called Dream of the Wild Horses made by Denys Colomb de Daunant in 1960. A large herd of wild horses were set on fire for his film and consequently died after it was made. I found a copy of the film in color-faded bright red for $10 and altered and destroyed it by hand. Strange Radiance dissects and questions socialized ideas of romantic love, gender, freedom and power. In my film, I rephotograph these images together using direct animation and optical printing techniques in an attempt to free the figures from the archive I have reopened to them. Audio clips from old time radio romantic-dramas narrate a fever-dream journey through a new world in which escape seems almost possible.
The Four Columns
directed by Dominick Rivers
The epilogue to the "Dreams Not Remembered" series.
This piece embodies the concept of forced reconciliation, portraying the inevitable return of all things to the earth. The demolition of the house, once a symbol of power and nostalgia, prompts contemplation on how memory embeds itself. Questions arise regarding the geography of memory: What recollections linger within a site, even in the absence of tangible remnants? How do memories become ingrained in the earth itself?
The Super 8 film was buried at the location of the house for a duration of 27 days—one day for each year of the artist’s brother's life.
Algo
directed by Arianna Gazca
Algo, in Spanish, means “something.” However, in Greek, “algos” means “pain” and “suffering.” In response, this piece explores the meaning of “suffering” from “something.” A pain that must be understood in order to thrive into something. In short, a thesis of my melancholic musings.
Traces with Elikem
directed by Ariana Gerstein
Traces performed and captured by scanner and monitor surfaces. Other surfaces include paper and film. Light reflects and passes through, layers slide past and sometimes meet, punctuated by sounds vibrating and percussive. With the participation of Samuel Elikem Kwame Nyamuame, Ph.D. Visiting Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology and Dance Departments of Music, Theater (Dance) & Africana Studies
Resting Place
directed by Brittany Appleby
For those living with invisible illness we often find ourselves repetitively returning to rest. Resting Place captures the filmmaker returning to bed and reflects on their experiences living with chronic illness. The work utilizes multiple exposures to illustrate the ritual of rest.
Ghost Rider
directed by Big Top Collective
Shot on 8 mm Kodachrome film in West Berlin in 1988, this dream-like hallucinogenic film is dedicated to the memory of our friend, filmmaker and musician, Lisa Tibodo, who brought us to Germany to screen Canadian experimental films. We shot additional black and white S-8 mm film in Victoria in 2023, and edited in 2024 at FLUX media gallery.
Afterimage
directed by Cara Fairchild
An experimental exploration of grief through manipulation of images from the filmmakers childhood home videos
refrigerator hum
Jade Wong
An artist collects and processes images of their mother’s restaurant kitchen and their grandmother’s daily life. Memory and embodied knowledge is reanimated through various image formats: 35mm portraits on oscillating lenticular prints, laserjet prints of 35mm film transferred onto 16mm loops, and photographic prints on polystyrene. An intergenerational critique unfolds.