Iris Film Collective

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Iris Film Collective

The Iris Film Collective is a Vancouver-based group of independent media artists creating, exhibiting and touring experimental film-based works.

The Iris Film Collective is a Vancouver-based group of independent media artists creating, exhibiting and touring film-based works with a goal to increase the visibility and accessibility of experimental time-based media art locally, in Canada, and internationally. We are interested in presenting work in unconventional spaces outside of the standard black box, as well as in creating works that sit

outside the norms of single channel work, using expanded formats, challenging presentation standards, and investigating the materiality of the moving image through physical manipulation of both the projection mechanism and the film itself.

06/08/2026

DIM Cinema
Notes in Origin: The Films of Ellie Epp
June 15 (Monday) 7pm

“What I like in film is precision, slightness, economy of means, delight, inference, and a kind of motion that can be followed but not tagged, and makes seeing intelligent.” —Ellie Epp

A near-mythic voice in North American art cinema, Ellie Epp has created a moving, rigorous, and immersive body of work.
The Iris Film Collective is thrilled to present this retrospective featuring Epp’s four 16mm films (1975–1996) in new digital restorations and five more recent digital video works never before shown in Vancouver.
Epp’s meticulously minimalist films invite a lyrical looking and seeing, listening and hearing. Each work is an instrument of perceptual and philosophical inquiry, an encounter with fleeting and feeling moments.

The screening will be introduced by programmer Alex MacKenzie, Iris Film Collective.

Limited edition postcards will be available at the screening highlighting Ellie Epp’s monograph — film, writing, theory, interviews, comment, notes: ellieepp.com/monograph/ellieepp29MB.pdf

FILMS:
trapline • Canada/ UK 1975 • 18 min.
current • Canada 1986 • 2 min.
notes in origin • Canada 1987 • 15 min.
bright & dark • Canada/ USA 1996 • 3 min.
by the lotus • Canada/ USA 2013 • 3 min.
here • Canada/ USA 2013 • 3 min.
ocean beach pier three movements • Canada/ USA 2013 • 8 min.
pale hill • Canada/ USA 2013 • 6 min.
last light • Canada/ USA 2013 • 7 min.

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05/15/2026

Iris Film Collective are looking forward to Nisha Platzer’s film ‘back home’ to be screened at Close-Up Cinema, in London

⭐️May 19th at 8:15pm

📍Close-Up Film Centre
97 Sclater Street, London, UK.

Join Nisha for a screening of her award-winning film, ‘back home’ followed by a Q&A session.

Close-Up makes film culture and history accessible through its cinema programmes and Library. Established in 2005, Close-Up is the most comprehensive independent film resource in London.

More Info and tickets: https://www.closeupfilmcentre.com/film_programmes/2026/back-home-qanda-with-nisha-platzer/

05/13/2026

Our friends at XINEMA will be hosting their first outdoor event of the year, Controlled Demolition: an experimental film program guest curated by Dominick Rivers // .

Controlled Demolition
Sunday, May 17, 8:30pm
5050 Wales Street, Norquay Park

This program aims to expand the notion of destruction beyond spectacle or finality to consider what it means to dismantle and to transform, and how, within these processes, new meanings might take shape. Featured 16mm films by Ieva Balode // + Michael Higgins // , Kyath Battie // .bad.e, Sarah Bliss // , Cooper // , Dave Johnson // , oneanders // , Kristin Reeves // , Dominick Rivers, and Robert Schaller // approach this topic from a number of angles. Some turn toward the natural world to reveal systems already under stress, while others trace how social and psychological infrastructures fracture, exposing patterns of addiction and mental health that suggest breakdown is deeply intimate and systemic. . .

This program will conclude with a special screening of the Eco-mordançage & the Moving Image workshop results & an in-person Q+A with visiting filmmakers Dominick Rivers, Kyath Battie, Robert Schaller and more (TBD).

Total program time (without workshop footage): 37 min

This program will be held outside of their Norquay Park Fieldhouse. Please dress appropriately and bring blankets or lawn chairs to sit on the grass, as there will be limited seating available.

05/05/2026

We are thrilled to be a community partner with DOXA once again to present "The Latest News from Deseret" by Christopher Pavsek, an experimental non-fiction film about the history and landscapes of Utah between 1992 and 2024, a period of radical change in the political, social and ecological history of Utah, and a period of dramatic change in the technologies and art of filmmaking. The Latest News is a sequel to James Benning's classic film "Deseret" (1995), which recounted a history of Utah from 1852 to 1992.
The film consists of 49 stories from the NY Times published between 1992 and 2024, each condensed to roughly 5 sentences and each illustrated with one moving image for each sentence. The result is a history of contemporary Utah, a tour of Utah's varied landscapes, a history of the journalistic style of the New York Times, a reinterpretation of Benning's work, and a reflection on the prospects of avant-garde cinema.
Screening Sunday May 10th at 8:30pm at The Cinematheque.
Tickets here:
https://doxa2026.eventive.org/films/69c44e8374315699a7252e3e

www.christopherpavsek.ca
This film is part of their paraDOXA series and has a Q&A or Panel on Sunday May 10.
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04/29/2026

We are very excited to be a community partner with DOXA once again this year to present Partition/ تقسیم, a film by Diana Allan that fuses archival footage from the British occupation of Palestine with audio recorded of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, tracing lines of continuity left by seismic displacement. Silent films gathered in imperial collections hold histories that have barely been told, and ways of colonial seeing that seep into the present; Partition uses dialectical montage and asynchronous sound to examine both. Recovering Palestinian presence through story, voice and song, unraveling colonial pasts through soundscapes of the precarious present, Partition is a meditation on what bodies remember and empires forget.
Screening Saturday May 2nd at 2pm and Sunday May 3rd at 6pm at The Cinematheque. Tickets here:
https://doxa2026.eventive.org/films/69c44e8374315699a7252e53

www.partitionfilm.com
This film is part of the paraDOXA series and has a Q&A or Panel on Saturday May 2 and Sunday May 3.
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04/15/2026

Basement Films annual Experiments in Cinema festival is happening at the Guild Cinema in Albuquerque April 16-19, 2026 and we are excited to have Iris Film Collective member Alex MacKenzie's film Quoindust making its US premiere. Highlights at the festival include a retrospective of works by Dominic Angerame, Korean films from the EXiS festival, Q***r cinema from Way Out West, and much more. A free version of the event will be available through their website (www.experimentsincinema.org) April 28-May10.

04/11/2026

DIM Cinema!

April 20 (Monday) 7pm

Everybody in the Place:
An Incomplete History of Britain 1984–1992
United Kingdom 2018, Jeremy Deller 62 mins

“In the 30 years since acid house exploded into the UK’s consciousness, its myth as a sui generis phenomenon, dominated by a small vanguard of London-centric tastemakers, has become entrenched. With Everybody In the Place, artist Jeremy Deller turns this received wisdom on its head, situating rave and acid house at the very centre of the seismic social changes upending 1980s Britain.” -Ed Gillet, Frieze

Originally aired on BBC Four, Everybody in the Place is a documentary by Turner Prize-winning artist Jeremy Deller. It summarizes the explosion of acid house and rave in the UK as a reaction to wider and deeper fault lines in British culture, cutting across class, identity, and geography. Rare and unseen archive materials map this journey of protest, from abandoned warehouses to chaotic release on the dance floor. We join a group of students in an A‑level politics course as they discover these stories for the first time, viewing the history of acid house from the perspective of a generation for whom it is already the ancient past. Rave culture is not merely a cultural gesture, but the fulcrum for a generational shift, linking industrial histories and radical action to the expanses of a post-industrial future.

Programmed by Tobin Gibson.

03/13/2026

DIM CINEMA!!

Shared Resources
USA 2021 | Jordan Lord | 98 min.

MARCH 23 (MONDAY) 7:00 PM

“By foregrounding disability, Lord creates a film not only about debt, but also the fatigue it engenders. It's a tremendous evocation of exhaustion, the process of aging, the maintenance of security (in one's own life and image), and above all, capitalism's breathless bureaucracies.”
—Emerson Goo, Screen Slate

Foregrounding accessibility as a participatory strategy, Shared Resources is a documentary that is as critical as it is sincere, as formally inventive as its themes are familiar. The project unfolds over five years, after filmmaker Jordan Lord's father Albert is fired from his job as a debt collector. Through Hurricane Katrina, a health scare, and bankruptcy, the film reconsiders debt through the relationships of a family in front of and behind the camera. Audio descriptions performed by Lord's family members add to already reflexive conversations, posing questions about comfort and consent. By unsettling documentary conventions, Lord reframes debt—what we owe to each other—not simply as obligation, but as a practice of access, care, and trust.

Post-screening virtual Q&A with director Jordan Lord.

Co-programmed by Casey Wei and Sara Wylie (Experimental Media Access Project).
The Experimental Media Access Project is a diverse committee of cultural workers, curators, and artists conducting research focused on dismantling barriers and prohibitive practices in media arts presentation, particularly those excluding d/Deaf, d/Disabled+, sick, or chronically ill individuals.

02/17/2026

DIM CINEMA at the Cinematheque!
February 23 (Monday) 7:00 pm
COLLECT, RELEASE, FALL, RISE: THE FILMS OF ERICA SHEU
In Person: Erica Sheu

“Erica Sheu portraits an attempt to the perpetual, as an impulse of desire that arises to grasp life and love in a condensed light phenomena.” —Ivonne Sheen, Desistfilm

Collect, release, fall, rise—gestures that echo through the cyclical process of making, remembering, and becoming. In this program, Iris Film Collective presents eight short films and expanded-cinema works by LA-based, Taiwanese artist Erica Sheu (徐璐). Shaped by her Asian-American experience of migration, Sheu’s works move through ritual, routine, and resilience, finding comfort in familiar spaces, textures, and materials. Light flickers, shadows, and refractions that are present within her studio, domestic, and natural surroundings guide viewers through intimate familial and historical reflections. These aspects shape and hold the filmmaker’s engagement, where the act of creation becomes a form of communion with place, family, and the self. This program invites a closer look at how vulnerability takes form through process, and how instinct becomes a method of understanding, revealing the quiet ways memory, identity, and connection unfold on screen. —Sidney Gordon, Iris Film Collective
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http://irisfilmcollective.com/

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