PRIX DU JURY MUFF 20  |  MUFF 20 JURY PRIZES

MUFF 20 | 15–17 mai / May, 2026

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​Prix du jury   |  Jury Prizes
​alphabétique par titre  |  alphabetical by title

The MUFF 20 Jury:
Zoë Brown
Karina Mariano
Rick Trembles

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NOCTURNE
Zoë LeBrun | Canada | 2025 
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I picked Nocturne as my favourite because I enjoyed the deteriorating video quality of it accompanied by an almost fairytale-like text that came across as darkly humorous to me. The abyss of lossy visuals we're gently asked to surrender to was both inviting and foreboding; the work felt like it was being delivered by a surveillance camera from another dimension monitoring a shimmering petri dish full of mysterious time-lapse disintegrating portals, pixels, fractals, and static. Just what the doctor ordered! Congratulations!

—Rick Trembles

ON THE GLUE
​Dave Johnson | Canada | 2025
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This film feels like home. ​It reminds me of why we started MUFF 20 years ago, to show films that don’t just sit there, but hit you. Films that grab you, shake you, maybe even punch you in the face … and you love them for it. On the Glue does exactly that. It pulls from a 1970s BBC exposé on glue sniffing, a so-called public service warning, and fractures it into something much more layered and alive. The story unfolds through a reporter, a mother, and her son David, caught in the label of “addict.” But what we’re really seeing is bigger than that. It’s about how systems frame people. How fear gets packaged. How addiction and mental health are reduced to stereotypes, the same ones that still exist in every city, everywhere. What’s powerful here isn’t just the subject, it’s the method. The filmmaker literally works with the material of the film, gluing it, tearing it, reassembling it. The image itself carries the violence, the instability, the tension. It’s not just a metaphor, it’s embedded in the form. It’s handmade, precise, and destructive at the same time. Built frame by frame, measured and cut by hand. You feel that process. This is what experimental film can do at its best: take something familiar, break it open, and make you see it and feel it differently. For its rawness, its intelligence, and its refusal to look away, we’re proud to give this award to On the Glue.

​— Zoë Brown

WHEREVER STREET PIECE
​Panu Johansson | Finlande | 2025

What draws me to experimental film, above all, is its capacity for deep, unmediated connection. Not through narrative clarity, but through sensation, through the raw transmission of how someone experiences and processes the world. Experimental cinema holds onto what is often fleeting: emotions, fragments, traces of lived experience. It doesn’t resolve them, it preserves them.
Wherever Street Piece resonates strongly because it allows the past to surface in a way that feels both fragile and insistent. Through its fragments, images, gestures, remnants, it reveals that others before us have already confronted the fractures we recognize today. They observed, understood, and responded in their own ways, leaving behind forms that still carry meaning. And yet, despite these accumulated attempts, we are faced with the same unresolved bullshit today. History is repeating itself and we are fucked. It is precisely this tension between memory, resistance, and recurrence that makes this film so powerful, and why it stands out so clearly among this year’s selections.

​— Karina Mariano

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​MUFF 20 Jury: Zoë Brown, Karina Mariano, Rick Trembles

​ZOË BROWN is a Montreal-based social worker and co-founder of MUFF alongside partner-in-film, Karina Mariano. Zoë studied Cinema at Concordia University, obtaining a Master in Fine Arts with a Cinema specialization. She was recognized for her short films and experimental cinema that often challenged the patriarchal box in which we all live. In 2006, she co-founded the Montreal Underground Film Festival (MUFF) alongside Karina Mariano, establishing a vital platform for experimental and independent cinema that challenge commercial film standards. She currently works as a social worker with families and children in Montreal. She is also a certified forest therapy guide, and a part-time lecturer at McGill and has a private practice outside of work. Zoë strongly aligns the narratives in film with the narratives of the families she works with, seeing them as intertwined and connected.  

KARINA MARIANO is a Montreal-based filmmaker and arts manager recognized for her dedication to grassroots, experimental cinema. In 2006, she co-founded the Montreal Underground Film Festival (MUFF) alongside Zoë Brown, establishing a vital platform for experimental and independent cinema that challenges commercial film standards. An alumna of Concordia University and HEC Montréal, Mariano’s own creative practice often utilizes Super 8 film to create intimate, artisanal shorts like Hold Me, Don’t Let Go. She currently serves as the Booking and Logistics Manager for the experimental music festival Suoni Per Il Popolo, continuing her work at the intersection of cultural management and the Montreal arts community.

​RICK TREMBLES is a Montreal-based cartoonist, animator, writer, & musician. His comics have been published since the late-seventies. Two books of his “Motion Picture Purgatory” comics have been published by FAB Press (2004 & 2009). Three graphic novels, “Weakly Dispatch” (2022), “Represented Immobilized” (2022), & “Gesticulating Gentrification” (2025) are available from Conundrum Press. His animated short “Goopy Spasms” (2004) has toured the film festival circuit internationally. The Guardian has called his Motion Picture Purgatory comic strip movie reviews “genius.”