We’re in the middle of a digital revolution, and as far as cinema goes, that means the old ways of photochemical film die a little more each day. That means there’s something reassuring and even beautiful about The 8 Fest, a self-described Small-Gauge Film Festival dedicated to old-school Super 8 and 8mm presentations.
This year’s edition, running tonight (Friday) through Sunday at Trash Palace on Niagara Street, offers a wealth of grainy, scratchy short films organized into three evenings’ worth of programming and a Sunday matinee.
Tonight, for example, there’s Go East, Your West, Go East! at 7 pm, a selection of shorts produced for the past few editions of Calgary’s long-running $100 Film Festival. Sunday at 7 pm, there’s A History Of Toronto In 8 Millimetres, collecting home-movie footage from the 1930s to the 1970s for a look at a vanished – and deeply square – city. And Saturday night at 11pm, the festival presents Linda Feesey’s Fuckhead Film Cycle, which is about as far from square as you can get.
The 8 Fest’s annual showcase of recent Super 8 and 8mm work has been split into two parts. Bageroooo, Fore! Part One (tonight at 11 pm) includes Ottawa filmmaker Pixie Cram’s Three Bathers, a voyeuristic study of three women glimpsed doing something curious in a secluded woodland area.
From Montreal comes Alexandre Larose’s Broullard, which superimposes 32 different takes of the same twilight walk into a single unsettling journey. Toronto’s Lina Rodriguez (whom, full disclosure, I’ve known for years) contributes Protocol, a silent contemplation of the Castillo de San Felipe de Barajas in Cartagena, Colombia.
And Bill Baldewicz’s Windy, photographed in various California and Nevada locations, splits the screen into four 8mm frames showing paired footage of kites, windmills, wind turbines and empty fields. It struck me as vaguely sinister, which is odd considering the filmmaker says he was led to the project due to his interest in “alternative energy forms.”
Bageroooo, Fore! Part Two, screening Sunday (Jan. 30) at 9 pm, offers Calgarian Cailtlind R.C. Brown’s Magicontrol, a collage of black-and-white footage set to a playful voiceover that reminds us we’re watching “a purposefully fictitious story,” and Tara Nelson’s Snow, which the Boston filmmaker produced as a kind of therapy after a disastrous hospital experience. (The I.V. bag we see in several shots is Nelson’s own.)
And Stephanie Gray’s You Know They Want To Disappear Hell’s Kitchen As Clinton sets 17 minutes of elegiac footage of brownstones, storefronts and signage from the Manhattan neighbourhood to selections from E.B. White, commenting on the city’s repeated attempts to gentrify one of the most infamously seedy parts of New York.
Also in Part Two, but unavailable for preview, is Rob Cruickshank’s Chicken Accelerator, which was produced for last year’s Images festival and is described thusly: “As chickens are accelerated to near-light speed, the very fabric of time and space is warped.” Who wouldn’t want to see that?
Tickets are $5 per event, or $25 for a festival pass. Full schedule available at www.the8fest.com.
