Events
Live Screening: From Cape Town to Scarborough + Cinemobilia
Location: 70 Prairie Drive, Scarborough, ON M1L 1L5
Date: July 22, 2023
Time: 4PM
Arriving in Toronto in 1973, the Liliefeldt family embraced life in Scarborough, participating in everything from skating at Nathan Phillips Square to visiting African Lion Safari. A series of landscape shots place the family’s school, townhouse complex and church in the then wide-open vistas of north Scarborough. Images that show the period in which Toronto’s multicultural self-image was largely created. Louise Liliefeldt (who appears in the films of her family along with her brother Jeremy, and parents Rosalind and Peter) will be present, contributing to the narration.
Come digitise your home movies! CineMobilia is a nonprofit mobile media digitisation lab dedicated to providing a mobile infrastructure for archiving and presenting archives from our partner organisations. They will be there from 4PM-7PM.
Workshop: Experimental Filmmaking with Archival Footage
Location: 1137 Dupont Street, Toronto, ON M6H 2A3
Date: July 27, 2023
Time: 10AM
Participants will repurpose and rework existing Super 8 and 8mm film using a variety of tactile analogue techniques including: painting, drawing, scratching, tinting and toning, bleaching, collaging, contact printing onto 16mm film and processing using conventional and eco- chemistries. No previous experience is necessary.
Workshop: Film Collage
Location: Beaver Hall, 29 McCaul Street, Toronto, ON M5T 1V7
Date: July 28, 2023
Time: 12PM
In this workshop participants will create 8mm collage films, a practice that Jake picked up while working as an intern for Craig Baldwin at Other Cinema in San Francisco. Film collage allows artists to repurpose all varieties of discarded films, giving them new life as handmade, anomalous works of art. Super8 and 8mm footage will be provided, but participants are also welcome and encouraged to bring their own.
Bageroo #1: We Were, We Are, We Will Be
Location: Beaver Hall, 29 McCaul St, Toronto ON, M5T 1V7
Date: July 28, 2023
Time: 8PM
In this shorts program, filmmakers reflect on themselves, their surroundings, and others around them. These shorts recall the beginnings of small-gauge filmmaking, in which filmmakers relied on the format to document their memories, their lineages, and their familial relationships. These shorts connect each other through the lens of documentation, sentiment and provenance.
Co-Presented with LIFT
www.lift.ca
Bageroo #2: Merry-Go-Round
Location: Beaver Hall, 29 McCaul St, Toronto ON, M5T 1V7
Date: July 28, 2023
Time: 9PM
Using playfulness and whimsy, these films attract audiences into the lighthearted nature of small-gauge filmmaking. These films embody the spirit of small-gauge, reminiscent of slap-stick, theatricality and frivolity. This all-around joyful Bageroo brings out our inner child, reminding us that it is okay to laugh, to play, and to enjoy life.
Sponsored by PleasureDome
www.pdome.org
Workshop: Phonotropes
Location: Beaver Hall, 29 McCaul Street, Toronto, ON M5T 1V7
Date: July 29, 2023
Time: 4PM
Learn about pre-cinema animation devices such as thaumatropes and zoetropes, and then apply the techniques covered in this workshop to make your own physical animation devices on paper. This workshop will focus on the creation of phonotropes; paper discs that, when rotated on a record turntable, activate looping animations that are drawn directly onto the disc. Once mastered, this simple technique has a multitude of different variants and creative applications. No animation experience necessary.
Deviations: A Retrospective of Small Gauge Films by Wrik Mead + In Conversation with Wrik Mead
Location: Beaver Hall, 29 McCaul St, Toronto ON, M5T 1V7
Date: July 29, 2023
Time: 6PM
Emerging from Toronto’s experimental film scene of the 1980s, Wrik Mead’s films have been internationally celebrated. Working across film, video, installation and print, the goal of this program is to explore a very specific small-gauge corner of his filmmaking practice. In the 1980s he began working in Super-8 and although he would continue to shoot on the format his exhibition prints were blown up to 16mm to allow for more screening opportunities into the 1990s. Curated by Robin Riad and Cayley James.
Sponsored by the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre and Co-Presented with the Toronto Queer Film Festival.
IMMANENT UNION
Location: Beaver Hall, 29 McCaul St, Toronto ON, M5T 1V7
Date: July 29, 2023
Time: 7PM
the8fest is pleased to present Kyle Whitehead’s IMMANENT UNION.
This Super 8 film on two reels is a retrograde attempt to resolve a personal archive and index, confronting the inexorable passage of time into memory, memory into echo and echo into resonance. IMMANENT UNION was spliced together live over the course of six performances in Mexico, the United Kingdom and Canada – these Drafts for a Scenario facilitating an aleatory approach to the global composition of disparate memories, fleeting images of recorded time that have no story to tell. Performative in essence – where sound is modulated live by the projected light itself – this mystical union justifies an immanent plane as an act of pastoral simplicity. A divine presence.
Bageroo #3 Tactile Musings
Location: Beaver Hall, 29 McCaul St, Toronto ON, M5T 1V7
Date: July 29, 2023
Time: 9PM
Delving into the world of physicality and technique, this program focuses on the materiality of film, working within its celluloid limitations to create something beyond imagination.
Perspectives, Observations, and Vignettes (POVs): Judy Blankenship, John Coburn, and Barbara Sternberg
Location: Beaver Hall, 29 McCaul St, Toronto ON, M5T 1V7
Date: July 30, 2023
Time: 3PM
Places, Observations & Vignettes (POVs), shows three distinct voices from a professional artist to a documentary photographer and an experimental filmmaker. Spanning from the early 1970s to the late 1990s, these Super 8 films have never been publicly viewed in their entirety until now. Themes of time, cycles and destruction, portended or literal, are evident in these films. Artist John Coburn’s New York City takes us on a journey through the iconic city with curious eyes and whose sharp attention and deep affection of Manhattan would later help define his career. Documentary photographer and writer Judy Blankenship’s critical lens of the devastation of downtown Batavia, New York, has echoes to present conservation concerns, particularly in Toronto. Experimental filmmaker Barbara Sternberg’s passage through the elements takes the universal subject of water, fire and air and transforms them into poetic visions of place. POVs bring old work into new contexts, highlighting the point of views of visions within Super 8.
Small Notes on Small Gestures
Location: Beaver Hall, 29 McCaul St, Toronto ON, M5T 1V7
Date: July 30, 2023
Time: 6:30PM
In a world where Grand Gestures (with a capital G), such as going into space, are celebrated in Grand Media, can a small gesture like collecting insect corpses serve as a point of displacement? This selection of films, made by artist-cineastes (with small a-c) from various corners of Brazil, provides fragmented time-space to celebrate small in-situ gestures. A ritual call to ancestry, nature-culture appropriated/excavated from the skull of the Mother Earth, artist’s own gesture of relating to the filmic material, ephemeral reincarnation of humans and non-humans. Most, if not all, of the works were revealed and revived by the artists themselves without institutional support.
Presented by Tetsuya Maruyama.
Screening: From Cape Town to Scarborough
Location: Beaver Hall, 29 McCaul St, Toronto ON, M5T 1V7
Date: July 30, 2023
Time: 8:00PM
Arriving in Toronto in 1973, the Liliefeldt family embraced life in Scarborough, participating in everything from skating at Nathan Phillips Square to visiting African Lion Safari. A series of landscape shots place the family’s school, townhouse complex and church in the then wide-open vistas of north Scarborough. Images that show the period in which Toronto’s multicultural self-image was largely created. Louise Liliefeldt (who appears in the films of her family along with her brother Jeremy, and parents Rosalind and Peter) will be present, contributing to the narration.