Images Festival
The hauntingly desolate summit of Mount Washington in New Hampshire is the main character of this beautiful, near-silent portrait of a remote weather station where wind speeds and temperature have been recorded for decades. The two women who work as the station’s summer and winter observers go about their routines (which are similar, except that one does it in completely frozen conditions), silently taking readings and measurements, walking across a striking, barren landscape that seems to grudgingly tolerate their presence. The observatory’s own website bills it as the place with the “world’s worst weather”, if that’s any indication of the...
Memorie Di Uno Smemorato is a film programme curated by Erik Martinson and plays as though the filmmakers were given only the title and went off on their own. Watching it requires a schism from your understanding of time and ignoring your desire to have everything explained in your language. Of the six productions, four contain verbal communication but instead of describing emotion or thought, they harmonize with the visuals. The first in the series Laida Lertxundi’s Llora Cuando Te Pase (Cry When It Happens) opens the programme with a distant, emotional resonance. Is it about the fallout, the moving...
The Nine Muses is epic – and I like that. Opening this year’s Images Festival, John Akomfrah’s visual ode to transatlantic migration buries itself deep in the psyche, probing and agitating. And that’s exactly the way a film festival should be opened. As last year’s mega-art film The Tree of Life proved, the epic doesn’t need to be about massive, ridiculous battle scenes and generic english accents – it can be about a Texan family in the ’50s. Or, as Akomfrah demonstrates, it can express the experience and treatment of coloured citizens in the United Kingdom. After watching The Nine...
The Images Festival opens on Thursday April 12, but in the days and weeks preceding the fest, they’ve hosted some very interesting events, including a screening of Marielle Nitoslawska’s Breaking the Frame, a documentary about mutli-disciplinary artist (and kick-ass feminist) Carolee Schneemann, whose work has been reshaping the discourse on gender, sexuality and the (female) body since the 1960s. Carolee Schneeman uses her own body (as well as others’) to delve into issues of sexuality, eroticism, taboo, and her often explicit work has caused immense discomfort within the male-dominated art world she came of age in as an artist. A...
Leave it to the 25th edition of the esteemed cultural force that is the Images Festival to celebrate their birthday by turning morbid. On your anniversary, why celebrate life when you could highlight the myriad atrocities and sufferings of death? This, among many other reasons, is why Images remains a daring and entertainingly obstructionist annual event. A Letter to the Living, one of Images’ shorts programs which screens on April 17th, is comprised of short films about — you guessed it — death. Implicit in the program’s very title is that some cryptic message from beyond the grave is being...
A Place in the World is a compilation of four short films each exploring the theme of environment. They are drastically different from one another, but each manages to capture the theme of this programme perfectly in its own unique way. It begins with the dizzying Portrait De La Place Ville Marie. The longer you stare at large structures ““ especially modernist office towers ““ the more abstract they tend to become. The director gives movement to otherwise static structures, which allows them to be seen as something entirely new. After this we move onto darker fare with East Hastings...
Simone Rapisarda Casanova’s El árbol de las fresas (The Strawberry Tree), opens with four people laughing as they recount the complete destruction of their hometown of Juan Antonio, by hurricane. There’s no punchline, and it’s not a joke. The remote village Cuba’s North Eastern coast really was completely wiped out only a few weeks after Rapisarda Casanova completed filming on his documentary about the lives of its inhabitants. And yet, the four former neighbours are able to find some levity in the situation, as they talk about how life was better there. At the end of this scene, we’re transported...
North America’s largest festival for experimental film, Toronto’s Image Festival, is having its 25th anniversary this year! And they have 10 days, 88 films and videos, 26 installations, and 5 live performances with which to celebrate, beginning on Thursday, April 12. There’s lots of interesting and unique works on offer for viewers looking for something a little more thought-provoking than your usual cinema fare....
Guys, I’m super bummed. The Images Festival‘s line-up looks amazing this year and I can’t go! I’ll be out of town. So, do me a favour and don’t miss it. The Images Festival is North America’s largest experimental and avant-garde festival of moving images and the culture that surrounds them. This is the 24th annual iteration of the fest, and its even fuller than usual with amazing screenings, installations, artist talks, and live performances. You can look at the full calendar with dates, times, and descriptions here, and you can download a pdf of the calendar on their site too,...
Not content with showcasing some of the finest examples of contemporary moving image culture, the Images Festival supports artists and their work with a post-festival distribution of awards, all with prizes sponsored both by Images and other generous community donors. Festival Executive Director Scott Miller Berry hosted the awards ceremony. What follows are just a few of the many talented and deserving winners....
So, my ten-day-long foray into the world of contemporary moving image culture has been nothing short of fascinating, both for the unusual and thought-provoking things I’ve seen, as well as for the tons of cool people I’ve met. The adventure continued last Wednesday night with a program of short films and videos curated by Oliver Husain and Kathleen M. Smith, titled curiously: Revenge of the Theory Persons, or Don’t Just Sit There, Gentle Presence....
