Daniel Barrow, Every Time I See Your Picture I Cry - Performed at Images Festival 2009
A sure sign spring has arrived in Toronto is the annual Images Festival which starts April 1st. The month long event showcases film, video, new media and installation artwork, as well as artist talks on contemporary media art. The festival is unique in the breath of work it features in diverse venues across the city – everything from independent theatres and artist-run/public/private galleries to community centres and the halls of academia.
A first this year for the festival is the One Take Super 8 (OTS8) event which originated in Regina, Saskatchewan and is now expanding to Toronto for the first time. Filmmakers participating in the event make films using only a single cartridge of Super 8, and each film is shot, processed, and projected unaltered – for the first time, for both filmmaker and audience – with no post-production. 30 films are being shown in the inaugural Toronto event and I’m sure it will become a mainstay of the yearly festival.
Another highlight of Images is the Toronto premiere of Shirin Neshat’s Women Without Men. The Iranian-born American director and visual artist won the Silver Lion for Best Director for the film at the 2009 Venice Film Fest. The film’s focus on the British- and American-backed coup in Iran for over 50 years is sure to be compelling given the topic’s relevance to modern day Iran and its relationships with other countries. I’m sure the screening and artist talk with Neshat that follows the screening will be packed.
On the media art installation side of the festival program, some highlights include Winnipeg-born and Montreal-based artist, Daniel Barrow’s Emotional Feelings, which will see the artist manually creating forms of animation by projecting, layering, and manipulating drawings on an overhead projector. Wang Bing’s Crude Oil is a 14-hour film installation that captures an entire workday at a remoter drilling station in Qing Hui province. The documentary film-maker is well known to local audiences given his showings at the Toronto International Film Festival so this installation at one of the festival’s (and the city’s) most well-known venues, the Gladstone Hotel, is sure to be very well attended.