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Images Festival

IMAGES FESTIVAL 23 at the Bloor Cinema, Workman Arts and other venues from tonight (Thursday, April 1) to April 10. For details, see Indie & Rep Film, page 77. imagesfestival.com. See listings.


The relocation of the workman Arts exhibition centre to St. Anne’s Parish Hall at Dundas and Dufferin lets the 23rd edition of the Images Festival stretch out a little more than usual.[rssbreak]

Don’t worry, there’s still plenty of stuff to see around the festival’s old Queen and Ossington stomping grounds, including several installations and at least one documentary. But the new principal venue for the on-screen programs can’t help but shake things up.

Also shaking things up this year is a program that’s big on long-form work. Half a dozen 2010 entries crack the 60-minute mark, including the feature that kicks off the festival tonight at the Bloor.

Kamal Aljafari’s Port Of Memory (Thursday, 7 pm, Bloor rating: NNNN) finds an angle on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that isn’t often explored, examining the efforts of an Arab man – the director’s uncle, playing a version of himself – to hold onto his family’s Jaffa home after they’re classified as squatters. Aljafari tells the story in elliptical movements, less concerned with legal process than with capturing a mood of confusion and loss.

Port Of Memory is accompanied by Covered, John Greyson’s video essay about the agitation and threats of violence that forced the closure of the Queer Sarajevo film festival in 2008. (The thematic connection is evidently Greyson’s decision to pull his work from last year’s Toronto Film Fest to protest TIFF’s selection of Tel Aviv as the focus of its first City To City program.)

In an odd coincidence, two filmmakers have separately chosen to explore the collision of negative space and 17th century Spanish-language texts. Nicolás Pereda’s hypnotic Todo, En Fin, El Silencio Lo Ocupaba (All Things Were Now Overtaken By Silence) (Tuesday, 9 pm, Innis Town Hall rating: NNNN) follows a film crew recording performance artist Jesusa Rodriguez in near-darkness while she reads a poem by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Emily Wardill’s Game Keepers Without Game (Sunday, 4 pm, Workman Arts rating: NN) transposes Calderón de la Barca’s play Life Is A Dream to present-day London, with her cast emoting against blank white backgrounds – a choice that proves quite wearing over the course of 81 minutes. Game Keepers screens as part of On-Screen Program 3, Disembodied Bodies Parts I & II.

Luo Li’s I Went To The Zoo The Other Day (Friday, 7 pm, Workman Arts rating: NNNN) is a quietly moving study of two people working some stuff out on a day trip to the Metro Toronto Zoo, their conversations intercut with black-and-white footage of animals and spectators.

Tacita Dean’s Craneway Event (rating: NNNN) records three days of rehearsal by Merce Cunningham’s dance company in the craneway of an abandoned Ford factory looking out on San Francisco Bay.

The dancers work without music, breaking the piece down into sections, leaving us to assemble the performance in our heads and reflect on the process of collaboration and creation between the wheelchair-bound Cunningham and his unfettered performers. A special presentation, the piece screens at Gallery TPW Tuesdays to Saturdays through April 24 at 12:30 and 3 pm, with additional screenings Thursdays at 7 pm.

On-Screen Program 4, Included In The Present Classification (Sunday, 8 pm, Workman Arts rating: NNNN), offers the richest assortment of short works, including Alexandra Navratil’s A Fraction Of A Second Earlier, Juan Ortiz-Apuy’s Disruptions, John Forget’s Flares For The Melodic Forest and Abraham Ravett’s non-Aryan.

And this year’s Canadian Artist Spotlight (Friday, 9 pm, at Workman Arts rating: NNNN) showcases the combative, confrontational work of experimental filmmaker Ross McLaren, founder of Toronto’s Funnel collective in the 1970s. From 1976’s playful Weather Building to the spastic 1977 punk rock performance documentary Crash ‘N’ Burn, McLaren mixes content and form like a prankster, setting a radio interview with a cranky Jack Smith to footage of highways and train tracks in Dance Of The Sacred Foundation Application – and leaving us with the sensation that we’ve been listening to the interview while driving.

The highlight of the McLaren retrospective is Summer Camp, a surreal 1978 assemblage of kinescopes of auditions for a CBC-TV special on youth culture. As the young performers are put through their paces – giving canned responses to an interviewer, reciting a terrible monologue and then improvising a conversation with a depressed older brother who reveals he’s dying of cancer – their prepared sunniness collides with the darkness of the material, shattering the facade of fresh-faced Canadian youth. It’s deeply disturbing stuff, vividly alive in the best way. 3

normw@nowtoronto.com

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