WNDX unveils its 20th anniversary program

WNDX unveils its 20th anniversary program

Including a retrospective screening of the works of Jaimz Asmundson

Five-day experimental film festival runs Oct 1-5, 2025

The WNDX Festival of Moving Image was established in 2005 as a grass-roots organization to support a new generation of independent filmmakers rising up in Winnipeg and in the larger prairie region. Co-founded by filmmakers Cecilia Araneda and Solomon Nagler, other members of WNDX’s early organizing group included Jaimz Asmundson and Carole O’Brien.

Twenty years later, while WNDX still retains a strong focus on local work, the festival has emerged as the most important international experimental film festival on the prairies.

The festival’s special 20th anniversary celebrations open with a retrospective of the films of WNDX’s own Jaimz Asmundson, one of Winnipeg’s most influential filmmakers, editors and programmers, who passed away far too young in 2024 at the age of 42. Asmundson’s significant contributions to WNDX over so many years played a critical role in the festival reaching this milestone anniversary.

Air, Fire, Water, Earth: The Films of Jaimz Asmundson opens the festival on Wed Oct 1 at 7 pm, at the Gas Station Theatre. A post-screening Q&A will follow, with Asmundson’s wife and long-time artistic collaborator, Karen Asmundson, and his father C. Graham Asmundson.

The One Take Super 8 Event

This milestone edition of the festival also includes a number of special curated shorts programs that look back at 20 years of WNDX new prairie cinema programming – among them 20×25: One Take Retrospective, curated by One Take Super 8 program founder Alexander Rogalski, who hails from Saskatoon. This retrospective joins the annual One Take Super 8 Event screening this year, one of Winnipeg’s most popular film events. Both screen Thurs Oct 2 at the Gas Station Theatre.

“The first One Take Super 8 Event at WNDX was unforgettable. It had the atmosphere of a DIY punk show where everything could have gone terribly wrong, yet somehow didn’t. That night created the mythology that cemented the One Take into Winnipeg film lore,” says Alexander Rogalski, who is returning to the festival on this special anniversary year, to assemble the reels and project the films once more.

⇥ View photos from WNDX’s early years

Other festival highlights this year include:

• The stunning experimental feature documentary Eastern Anthems, a long-form film exploring Great Eastern Brood X periodical cicadas that emerge every 17 years. The film’s co-directors Matthew Wolkow (Montreal) and Jean-Jacques Martinod (Denver) will be in attendance at the screening.

• The retrospective programs Land’s End, curated by Winnipeg’s Cecilia Araneda, which pulls from 20 years of past WNDX programming, and Something is Calling You, curated by Manitoba’s Jenny Western, celebrating the work of Indigenous prairie filmmakers over the past two decades.

• A series of new short films from prairie, Canadian and international filmmakers that includes premieres by local and expat Winnipeg filmmakers Daniel Barrow, Natalie Baird & Toby Gillies, Caroline Monnet, Freya Björg Olafson, Tracy Peters, Tavis Putnam, Diana Thorneycroft and Miriam Temesghen. This shorts series includes a program of midnight shorts, There is Something Wrong Here, that would surely receive Jaimz Asmundson’s personal stamp of approval

• The touring Seeds Songs for Palestine shorts program, which engages in themes of seed sovereignty and Indigenous resilience. WNDX’s screening will be introduced by the Toronto-based co-curator Scott Miller Berry and Calgary’s Ryley Williams, a mixed First Nations / settler filmmaker whose short film it’s amazing that you still exist is included in the program.

• The world premiere of Jaimz Asmundson: Dash Jam, an unfinished 25-minute documentary which sees Asmundson’s Cinematheque colleague and friend David Knipe interview Asmundson, the musician, about his beginnings and influences, while riding out a COVID quarantine. This work closes out the festival on Sun Oct 5 at 7 pm, at Video Pool’s The Output, and is followed by a VHS party featuring Asmundson’s legendary edits created for his Cream of the Crap series.

Many of the screening filmmakers will be in attendance. 

The festival presents a unique opportunity for audiences to exchange with contemporary filmmakers and video artists.

_{MEDIA INQUIRIES:}

Cecilia Araneda – cecilia@wndx.org

Acknowledgements

WNDX is based in the city of Winnipeg, which is Treaty 1 territory, the traditional territory of the Anishinaabe, Cree, Oji-Cree, Dakota, and Dene Peoples, and the homeland of the Red River Métis Nation. 

WNDX gratefully acknowledges the generous support of: the Canada Council for the Arts, the Winnipeg Foundation, the Manitoba Arts Council, the Winnipeg Arts Council and Telefilm Canada.

WNDX also acknowledges the support of our community partners and sponsors: On Screen Manitoba, Manitoba Film + Music, NIMAC: National Indigenous Media Arts Coalition, Black Film Collective, Harbour Collective and Fascinasian Film Festival.