Wavelengths 2: Into the Blue, more than either of the other 2025 shorts programs or the features, exemplifies experimental film programming’s recent trend toward documentary, essay, and other “non-fiction” forms. All of the films in this program explore, in some fashion, the moving image as archive, memory, or trace of what came before.
The program opens with I Saw the Face of God in the Jet Wash, a diaristic short from Mark Jenkin, whose latest feature (Rose of Nevada) is also screening in Toronto. Speaking at rapid clip, Jenkin narrates over bits of grainy 16mm footage taken during his filmmaking travels, discussing his screenings, the mostly unadventurous happenings of trips around them, trivia about other filmmakers in the places he visits, and so on. Several of his films are referenced quickly in passing, by detail rather than title: “the stone film,” “my short film about the homeless couple.”
The peripheral nature of this footage and these anecdotes are the core of the film. The artist finds inspiration for his fantastical, elliptical films in all this mundane material. A statue near a campsite seems to have moved overnight and he wonders about its sentience later. But this never becomes a genre film of the sort Jenkin is known for. It is rather a wry and modest work for the amusement of fellow nerdy cinephiles. It relies tonally on comical shifts of syntax, and even more on references to classic movies. A boat is wrongly supposed to have been used in a Skolimowski film; Hitchcock was on vacation here once and he (Jenkin) thinks about Rebecca and what he’d do differently if he made a version; was this house a location for Baywatch? Jet Wash is charmingly insubstantial. It works well enough in a shorts program, but it might work even better as an appetizer for a feature film. Dare we hope that whoever buys Rose of Nevada takes this too?
Like Jenkin’s film, Minjung Kim’s From My Cloud is built from the odds and ends of the artist’s personal moving image archive, but is aesthetically opposite, in high-resolution digital photography. The title is a double entendre: these clips are from Kim’s digits media cloud, but also refer to a rain cloud, as described in text on the opening frame. The hodgepodge, observational nature of the source material is clear, but so are the formal connections that bind each cut. A spinning medallion becomes a spinning light which becomes a spinning camera. Swirling snowflakes cut to floating clouds of bubbles. The links are too clear. It’s easy to see the path Kim has found through the maze of her materials, but not what it adds up to. The strongest image here is the most obscure: a nocturnal, out-of-focus shot of a waterline with a series of distant lights blurred into small orbs. Here’s some of the mystery the rest of the film lacks, and which defines the strongest features in Wavelengths this year (Dry Leaf, Levers).
Cairo Streets is similarly drawn from personal archives but more explicitly tied to the artist’s biography. At the beginning, text announces that a narrator has returned to Cairo and misses someone named Omar that the narrator knew here before. Shot on a small, handheld camcorder, which we see occasionally in mirrors, this sort of DV realism is so in vogue that it’s easy to assume this is new footage until Youssef Chahine (who died in 2008) shows up for a quick chat in his office. Everything after this moment takes a slightly different tone, as we realize this is 18 year old material and likely sourced from the artist’s previous time in Cairo, rather than a newly composed essay. This also makes better sense of both subsequent and following scenes, which indeed feel like the random things a young person would capture with a camcorder in 2007: street vendors waving, a conversation with an older relative, and so on. Eventually someone who might be Omar shows up alongside the artist. But while there’s a soft sense of the phantoms of a queer coupling that didn’t or couldn’t last, there isn’t enough to give an audience investment in the weight these memories obviously hold for their creator.
Daria’s Night Flowers is another essay-adjacent work featuring archival materials with added text, but it’s easily the strongest of the bunch. It’s also distinct from the rest of the program in that, like Maryam Tafakory’s previous two films, the source materials are not the artist’s own media library but the national cinema of Iran. Clips from a variety of Persian films both classic and (one assumes) obscure are tied together by an imposed narrative. A woman, Daria, has written a novel about a lesbian romance, which is discovered and read by her husband. He takes it as literal and burns the manuscript, but she has secretly sent the final chapter to a friend. Daria kills herself through prescription overdose, and her story is told in retrospect through these fragmented texts and images.
The film clips themselves are edited in fairly close alignment to the story as told. A variety of actresses and actors stand in for Daria and her husband and doctors, but it’s always clear enough what’s happening. The film’s power comes less from its actual narrative than, first, the way its composition emphasizes what narratives couldn’t historically be told in Iranian cinema, and second, the mysterious details that elaborate both images and story. Splotches of bright yellow and blue stain the screen like a dye, and plants appear repeatedly in narrative detail or digression, playing a perhaps lethal, perhaps magical role. Night Flowers recalls another wonderful recent experimental film that blurs narrative and essay, Nour Ouayda’s The Secret Garden, in this botanical detail as well as aesthetically and in its allegorical character.
The program ends with its shortest film, Kaiwen Ren’s Aftertide. Less textual and essayistic than the other films, it shares their concern with records and traces in formal connection, albeit at a higher level of abstraction. It opens with what is perhaps its best, and certainly its most ambiguous, sequence, of flickering, angular, crystalline shapes whose content is indiscernible but seems to be displayed on an old video monitor, and sound cues suggest this is underwater. Cut to a figure dancing away from a wall and leaving a shadow static in place, and then a textured surface which gradually reveals itself to be some sort of non-photographic printing capturing vines and what might be a squid or a fishing lure. It’s hard not to think of Erica Sheu’s Transcript at this point, and Ren is similarly interested in how physical beings and materials — and the means by which humans observe them — leave their less substantial mark as images.
The middle of Wavelengths’ three shorts programs is perhaps its weakest — it certainly never reaches the dazzling heights of Morgenkreis or FELT in the third program — but still displays the thoughtfulness of good programming that allows the films to be more than the sum of their parts. That’s true not just of the connections between them, but of the differences. Switching from 16mm to high-definition digital to camcorder to found footage while maintaining a clear thematic throughline allows each of these films to emerge in its specificity and illuminate what works, or doesn’t, in the rest of the program. This is a vital experience and platform for films of such awkward length, form, and commercial invisibility. Let’s hope that Wavelengths expands rather than continuing its contraction, and that local and regional festivals commit to including elements of such adventurous programming.
Published as part of TIFF 2025 — Dispatch 3.
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