Nicolas Provost remembers a specific point in his life growing up in Belgium. At age 12 he asked his dad, a landscape painter (of kitsch value, Provost said), for a bunch of pink toilet paper. He used it to make an installation in the bathroom and then took slide photos of it. “Complete chaos, very beautiful,” Provost said. He then was allowed screen-time when his parents had friends over for dinner and a holiday slideshow. The family wanted Nicolas to move faster through the photos.

Audiences for his work have somewhat expanded since then, with his past shorts Papillion D’Amour, Exoticore, and Induction playing in art galleries and film festivals around the world, including Sundance. This year Provost has two short works in the Festival, Plot Point, playing in the New Frontier Shorts Program, and Suspension, which opens up for the feature casting a glance.

Suspension is a piece of art consisting of a moving image. To describe it literally would give away the image you see, but could never give away the meaning because it is different for everyone.

“It’s all [made] by intuition. It’s really working with the material itself with sound and image until the magic happens,” Provost said. “You try to keep your finger on it as long as possible.” The film is “probably trying to get close to the cosmos,” he said, laughing, “to all the big philosophical questions one can have. That’s all. And I’m sure there are a lot of people who can write a lot of things about [the cosmos]. But I’m the one who works with the image. I can’t work with the words.”

As with the best art, Provost does not want to tell people what to think. Suspension is a silent film, concentrating on the purest element of the form: the image. Provost did make a soundtrack, but decided against using sound as an emotional guideline.

The difficulty with films that can be considered in the vein of art or avant-garde or experimental (a veritable “sticks and stones” of labels) is that audiences often go into these films looking to confirm preconceived notions. For audiences to engage with Suspension, they simply need a willingness to walk into the theatre with the sole intent of having an experience.

“I’m an artist before I’m a filmmaker,” Provost said. “I’m very conscious I’m working with image and sound almost like a painter or a sculptor. Sometimes [my works] are more paintings or fine arts than they are films. Sometimes I make films like Plot Point where I’m questioning the codes of cinema that we are conditioned with. That’s always something that comes back with all the works that I do: to try to move people by playing with the codes.

“I edit on a very small screen and I see it as a painting,” he added. “So every film, even if it is fiction, it has to work as much as a cinema experience or as poetry on a wall,” he laughed. “Oh my God! I’m in the bathroom looking at the toilet. I’m getting so deep.”