Rhayne Vermette

Thousandsuns
Cinema

Rhayne Vermette (Métis) is an artist and filmmaker born in Notre-Dame-de-Lourdes, Manitoba. Her filmmaking practice has been described as opulent collages of fiction, animation, documentary, re-enactments, and divine interruption. She received a BA in Literature from the University of Winnipeg (2005) and studied architecture at the University of Manitoba (2010). Her films take my word (2012), Black Rectangle (2014), Extraits d’une Famille (2015), Domus (2017), and Ste. Anne (2021) have screened at museums, festivals, and galleries internationally, including New York Film Festival, Berlinale, Canadian Film Institute, Melbourne International Film Festival, European Media Arts Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, New York Film Festival, Mar Del Plata International Film Festival, Viennale, Jeonju International Film Festival, Valdivia International Film Festival, imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival, and documenta Madrid, among many others. She is the recipient of awards, fellowships, and grants, including a Mosaic Film Fund Award from Winnipeg Film Group (2011), PLATFORM Photography Award from PLATFORM Centre for Photographic and Digital Arts (2019), an Amplify Voices Award for Best Canadian Feature Film from Toronto International Film Festival (2021), and Best Departures Feature from Indie Memphis Film Festival for Ste. Anne (2021). She lives and works in Winnipeg, Manitoba.

ONLINE SCREENING DATES: January 9 – January 30, 2023

FILMS IN THIS PROGRAM: Full of Fire, 2 min, 2013; Black Rectangle, 1.5 min, 2023; Domus, 15 min, 2017

This series is co-selected and presented with COUSIN collective and is generously funded by a Digital Now grant from the Canada Council for the Arts.

Full of Fire, 2 min, 2013

There are few alternatives for exiles. The homecoming may be postponed to an indeterminate future; one could settle for a replacement; and lastly, there is always madness.

Black Rectangle, 1.5 min, 2013

Time has not been kind to Kasimir Malevich’s painting, Black Square. In 1915 when the work was first displayed the surface of the square was pristine and pure; now the black paint has cracked revealing the white ground like mortar in crazy paving. – Philip Shaw

This film documents a tedious process of dismantling and reassembling 16mm found footage. The film collage imitates functions of a curtain, while the recorded optical track describes the film’s subsequent destruction during its first projection.

Domus, 15 min, 2017

The block of marble is the most beautiful of all statues – Carlo Mollino

This is the story of the godlike architect Carlo Mollino, animated within the desk space of failed architect Rhayne Vermette. Made, with love, on 16mm, 35mm, and Super 8, this classic tale of Pygmalion investigates intersections between cinema and architecture. For E. Ackerman, A. Jarnow, and T. Ito.

Domus is a house of cinema which is about the many homes that cinema can make for itself—on a table, in the air, on walls—proving well before her feature-length Ste. Anne how well Vermette knows the moveability of spaces that overlap to form a domain: its perimeter is affective, familial, territorial, nebulous, cultural, ancestral (the many ways that a domain’s outlines stretch beyond the home). As such, spaces slide over one another, animation on top of photography, scoring on top of figure modelling, spinning around in layers without any holy hierarchy, like the cat that appears randomly; the anarchical movement unties threads, unspooling the crystal-chrysalis of a spectacularly intimate cinema that reifies in metamorphosis: the domus as butterfly, as she concludes in text on screen. – Mathieu Li-Goyette

Read the full essay on Rhayne Vermette’s Domus at VISIONS.

Read an interview with Rhayne Vermette at Mubi Notebook.

Read an interview with Rhayne Vermette at desistfilm.

Exovede in the Darkroom: The Films of Rhayne Vermette is coming soon from ARP Books.

All stills, photographs, and artwork courtesy © Rhayne Vermette. Screening co-presented with Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto (LIFT).