Working in sublime self-isolation during the strange pandemic spring of 2020, avant-garde filmmaker Mike Maryniuk composes a surreal ode to rebirth and reinvention. Juxtaposing archival imagery with handcrafted animation, he conjures up a shimmering utopian dreamscape, a post-COVID world shaped by the primordial forces of nature—haunted by the genial spectre of Buster Keaton.

June Night

Cattle Call is a high-speed animated documentary about the art of livestock auctioneering. Structured around the mesmerizing talents of 2007 Man-Sask Auctioneer Champion, Tim Dowler, and using a variety of classic and avant-garde animation techniques (including stop-motion, cut-outs, open-exposures, hole-punching and rubbing lettraset directly on the celluloid) filmmakers Maryniuk and Rankin have created images as dazzlingly abstract, absurd and adrenalizing as the incredible language of auctioneering itself.  This hallucinogenic study of what Werner Herzog has termed the poetry of capitalism.

Cattle Call

An animated short film made with 6,490 photographs of spin art micro paintings.