Filling the sizeable gap for a festival of not-so-sizeable films left by the now-defunct Splice This, the inaugural 8 Fest offers two nights of “small gauge” movies Feb. 22-23. The four events at Stacey Case’s Trash Palace cinema (89B Niagara) contain a cornucopia of Super-8-only surprises.
The fest opens Feb. 22 at 7pm with a program of two works by Boston artist Saul Levine. Then in the CounterNarratives event at 9pm, 8 Fest co-founder Jonathan Culp invites artists (Luis Jacob!), rappers (Mohammad Ali Aumeer!), writers (Jessica Westhead!) and assorted “aesthetes” to provide live narration for vintage educational shorts about lemmings, stickleback fish and women’s gymnastics. More freshly unearthed curios (including a visit to the set of The Littlest Hobo) are displayed during Orphan Films on Feb. 23 at 7pm — a BYOS8M policy (bring your own Super-8 movie) will also be in effect.

Bageroo, a survey of new and old miniature works, follows at 9pm. Ripe for discovery are Sacha Fink’s We Are All In Your Head, which documents a not-so-chance meeting between some beautifully shot black-and-white film and a few felt-tip pens, and Diane Thorne Jacobs’ Shark Purse, which stars a watery creature who could have crawled out of a Jack Smith movie. What with the world literally running out of Super-8 stock, it’s good to see the medium’s devotees are keeping it weird.