the8fest

𝙎𝙪𝙗𝙢𝙞𝙨𝙨𝙞𝙤𝙣𝙨 𝙖𝙧𝙚 𝙤𝙥𝙚𝙣 the8fest Small-Gauge Film Festival is accepting submissions for 2026 ✴︎ We are a Toronto-based film festival that presents all forms of small-gauge film: 8mm, Super 8, and 9.5mm, as well as exhibiting works in installation, loops, personal, handmade, experimental, animations, diaries, essays, collage, cut-ups, performance-based films, sound-based films, and ‘proto-cinema devices’ like zoetropes. We can’t wait for another freaky little festival!!! 𝗦𝘂𝗯𝗺𝗶𝘀𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀 𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝗼𝗽𝗲𝗻 𝘂𝗻𝘁𝗶𝗹 𝗝𝘂𝗻𝗲 𝟳 @ 𝗺𝗶𝗱𝗻𝗶𝗴𝗵𝘁 𝘴𝘶𝘣𝘮𝘪𝘴𝘴𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘧𝘰𝘳𝘮 𝘭𝘪𝘯𝘬𝘦𝘥 𝘪𝘯 𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘣𝘪𝘰

2025 at CineCycle ❤️ So much gratitude for this year and for everyone who filled CineCycle with films, conversations, laughter, and projected light. Thank you for supporting artist run cinema and keeping experimental and independent film thriving in Toronto. More reels, more connections, more nights underground. Image descriptions: 1️⃣ 2️⃣ CFMDC and the8fest working together to run six film projectors of multiple sizes for the8fest 2025 CineCycle screenings 3️⃣ Final Girls Film Club team and audience chatting before their screening 4️⃣ Pepper’s Ghost Productions Drunk Script Reading fundraiser at CineCycle (photo credit @angelszafranko ) 5️⃣ TQFF audiences enjoying pizza before the screening of The Nest 6️⃣ Post screening Q and A during Toronto Reel Asian Film Festival 2025 7️⃣ Toronto Arab Film Festival screening and merchandise at CineCycle 8️⃣ View from the projection booth during Diffusion Film Festival 2025 9️⃣ BAICC Residencias Artísticas Internacionales de Creación Cinematográfica and LIFT preparing for the ninth edition of the residency program

The8fest # 18 💌 We love this community so much!!! Last weekend felt like a warm hug from an old friend. Thank you to all of the artists that shared their work with us. Still in awe of @robinriad ’s projectionist skills. Thank you @femininnnnnnne for not only inspecting our films but being such a cheerleader and supporter and to @poppi_fp for assisting such a smooth Saturday screening. @cfmdcfilm @_liftfilm we are endlessly grateful for your support for this festival, we could not have done it without you. And to all of you, we love you! See you at # 19 🫂 Photo credits: Jordan Huffman and Ema Walters

Tonight is our opening party and along with it, we launch our UNPROJECTABLES program on our website at 7pm EST. These are works shot on film but unable to play on a film projector. Available to watch for one week only from Nov 28–Dec 5, 2025. Patrick Doyon | Dizzy Cavalry | 2025 | Canada | 1 min | 24fps Dizzy Calvary is an experimental short film animated frame by frame under the camera. The 8mm reel becomes both subject and surface — reacting to and interacting with the moving images previously inscribed on it. The chaos of the battlefield disrupts the projection’s stability and clarity, blurring the line between medium and message.

Returning on Saturday Nov 29th at 7pm @cinecycle.toronto is a festival favourite —the Home Movie History Project! This year’s edition is FROM THE WARD TO BUCK LAKE Toronto’s original Chinatown through to the 70s counterculture scene. In the mid 1950s a couple with young children start to film their life in the north end of the city. Their films start out capturing much of the typical subjects seen in middle class home movies but also show specific scenes of Asian Canadian life — the family business in the Ward neighbourhood (location of the original Chinatown), and the wedding of friends in the community. As their kids grew older, their eldest son picked up the family movie camera and began to document the city, his friends, and the emerging counterculture. He recorded these subjects in unedited reels that are somewhere between home movies and art film traditions. The couple captured in their films: the Santa Claus parade, hula hoops, 50s pleated skirts and women’s hats, kids wrestling, tobogganing, and a Lion Dance on Dundas. Then the next generation observed everything from teenaged boys pretending to smoke, to a music ‘happening’ in a tipi at Buck Lake. #homemoviehistoryproject

TONIGHT, JC Culp presents Burn Pile, an immersive film installation. One night only at 847 Dovercourt Road aka Owls Club. Burn Pile invites viewers into an intimate encounter with transformation and release. Vintage Fisher-Price hand-cranked film viewers are mounted on sculpted wooden posts reminiscent of headstones. Inside each one, a single personal object burns—evidence from a decade-long process of self-examination and change tied to gender, memory, and self-image. Visitors control the motion, winding forward, reversing, or pausing each loop of film. Through these childlike devices, acts of private destruction become shared reflections—a meditation on identity, loss, and renewal. JC Culp has produced over 50 film and video works over a span of 35 years, including the ‘underground’ features TAKING SHELTER (2017) and GRILLED CHEESE SANDWICH (2004). They are also an orphan media archivist, and curate THE UNPOPULAR ARCHIVE channel on YouTube. This is JC’s second film installation, after MONDAY -> FRIDAY (2019).

We’re honored to have a live, expanded cinema performance, INSIDE-OUT-AROUND by Spanish filmmaker @luis__macias_ on November 28th at our opening night party at Owls Club! Luis Macías is an artist, filmmaker, and image-moving composer. His work explores the formal and spectral properties of the moving image through an investigation of the cinematographic device and the photochemical nature of film itself. Focused on experimental and procedural practices of analog image-making, his works in Super 8, 16 mm, 35 mm, and video are composed for projection, performance, or installation.

In addition to our in-person programming, our UNPROJECTABLES program will be available to watch online starting this week! These are works shot on film but unable to play on a film projector. Live for viewing on our website from Nov 28 – Dec 5 2025. Tessa Garland | Drift | 2025 | Belgium | 7 mins 25 seconds | Super8 | 24fps Drift is shot on Super 8 film. The sequence captures a walk around a precarious, low-lying sandbank island, where fleeting observations come into focus only to vanish again. Rotations and cycles ebb and flow, while sea-worn, foraged objects suggest deeper meaning. Prehistoric-looking cacti dot the island, contributing to its otherworldly and surreal atmosphere.

A new double channel Super 8 film, “Cherry Blossoms,” will be performed live at the8fest Small Gauge Film Festival on Saturday, November 29th at 5 PM. Stay for films by Tetsuya Maruyama, Larissa Fan, Callon Murphy, Hogan Seidel, k.Schreier, Sandy McLennan, Stefanie Weberhofer and Miglė Križinauskaitė with a moderated Q&A after the screening. Closing the festival is Home Movie History Project at 7 PM. Location: Martin Heath’s CineCycle, 129 Spadina Avenue, Toronto, ON Time: Saturday, November 29th, 5-9 PM Admission $10. @the8fest @cinecycle.toronto #super8

Rounding out Saturday’s festival programming on November 29th at @cinecycle.toronto —two special works not to be missed!🐚🎈 Hogan Seidel | in the streets of june | 2025 | USA | 4 min | Super 8 | 24fps Layered in the grain of Super 8, in the streets of june captures the vivid contradictions of a Seattle Pride parade: a kaleidoscope of joy and resistance, fractured and reframed through layers of multiple exposure. The film’s textured imagery merges the vibrant defiance of the parade with the imposing presence of police lines, their shadows cast across the glitter-strewn streets. Scenes of dancers and banners dissolve into one another, overlapping with sharp flashes of riot gear, creating a haunting interplay between celebration and surveillance. The camera lingers on fleeting moments while the weight of unseen power hovers, ever present. & Miglė Križinauskaitė | Does the Sea Have a Heart? | 2025 | Lithuania | 7 min | Super 8 | 24fps A poetic essay, an ode to the sea, which has no human figure at its centre, but only traces in the sand, echoes, and presence through absence. It is through this absence that the essence of the human spirit is best revealed. As Kahlil Gibran wrote: “There must be something strangely sacred in salt. It is in our tears and in the sea.”

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❄️ two more offerings for Nov 29th’s festival day ❄️ Stefanie Weberhofer | von Pisten und Maschinen | 2023 | Austria | 3 min | Super 8 | 18fps Part of the series In Bewegung / In Movement — fourteen Super 8 films exploring climate change in the Austrian Alps. Sandy McLennan | Seasonal Selfies | 2025 | Canada | 5 min | 8mm | 18fps Summer and winter film fun with a mirror (no smoke), audio recordings of the featured Bolex B8 camera and a bit of river sound to boot.