Small File Media Festival
The Small File Media Festival presents eco-conscious moving-image artistry from around the globe on October 17 and 18, 2026 at The Cinematheque in downtown Vancouver.
Now in its seventh year, the festival will showcase 85 films across six curated programs, selected from over 400 submissions worldwide and spanning narratives, documentaries, confessionals, animations, glitchfests, and sci-fis.
Small File Media Festival
- Dates: October 17 & 18, 2026
- Location: The Cinematheque (1131 Howe St, Vancouver)
- Tickets: Available online
The Small File Media Festival features small-file ecomedia, movies compressed at a rate of 1.44 MB per minute each, showing that great cinema doesn’t have to mean great big files. This lo-fi intervention draws from both DIY movements and computer-based artistic practices. The films embrace the aesthetics of file compression and low resolution and lay the groundwork for a new experimental film movement in the digital age.
Festival Program
The festival kicks off on Saturday, October 17 at 7:00pm with Series 1, pairing “Women Destroying Things” with “The Chaos of Quantity in Two Parts: Alien Capitalism and Telepathic Computation,” a twin program that oscillates between the chokehold of commodities and the reappropriation of capital for arcane purposes.
The festival continues on Sunday October 18 with two more series. Series 2 at 1:00pm features “So You Want to Be a Rock,” shimmering pixel-films that ask what it’s like to be a caterpillar, a plastic bottle, or a computer code, alongside “Suppose a Room,” a program of films that pass through, touch the walls, and leave the door open.
Series 3 at 4:00pm closes the festival with “Voidmaxxing (Joy That Kills),” eleven small films that traverse bodies, liquid humours, and VHS spaces, and “Grave Glitches,” a passage through the unclear limits of life, death, and rebirth.
All festival programming will then be available to stream online from October 31 to November 7, 2026. Follow on Instagram for updates.
The Small File Media Society was founded in 2020 to raise awareness of the high carbon footprint of streaming media. The festival proposes alternative solutions for media practice, as well as modes of thinking otherwise in media theory, which converged in an annual live and online festival of sustainable experimental media.
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