Rating: NNNNN
THE eighTH ANNUAL NEW TORONTO WORKS SHOW (various, 2000) brings together the best and weirdest experimental shorts produced by local artists last year. Sure, experimental means you see things like a man shaving his privates over a toilet (don’t worry, they put this one last), but you’ll be rewarded for your open-mindedness with some truly absorbing cinematic moments. Highlights include Je Changerais D’Avis (Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay), a split-screen French music video that features a live vocal performance as charged with emotion as Sinead O’Connor’s Nothing Compares 2 U. Cameron Esler’s The Bather is a home-video-style ode to swimming in public pools. His reverence is infectious. Hilda Rasula’s industrial sound and image collage, called Krajk, is better-choreographed than any Symphony Of Fire. And finally, Wrik Mead’s Camp is an enlightening study of gays in Nazi Germany. Combining archival footage with provocative images of two men coming together through pain, it’s a worthy companion piece to the award-winning documentary Paragraph 175. The show is at Latvian House, which promises a welcome respite from the McDonald’s-like atmosphere surrounding Hollywood films these days. NNN (Saturday, February 3)
