Subversions: New Works/New Media, a collection of nine short productions by emerging independent Canadian filmmakers, will be showcased today in The Independents, a monthly series of free screenings and discussions on independent Canadian cinema presented by York University’s Department of Film & Video in the Faculty of Fine Arts.
Left: Scene from Devouring Buddha
Hot Docs senior Canadian programmer David McIntosh will host the presentation and lead an informal post-screening discussion with participating filmmakers.
Subversions: New Works/New Media will offer a diverse and thoughtfully-curated selection of short films, videos and digital projects from the festival circuit, as well as limited-release local, national and international productions. Thematically, they all play on and reinvent existing media structures and forms, from music videos and surveillance cameras to Internet Web sites, for their own subversive purposes.
Here are the shorts to be screened.
Playing with Myself (2002) by Myles Bartlett (3 min.)
This digital composition portrays 10 different shots of one singer performing 10 different parts in one song, morphing into a single cubist visual and audio choir. Bartlett is a York University MFA student who has shown his work both nationally and abroad. While attending the Ontario College of Art & Design (OCAD), Bartlett was awarded the OCAD Medal in Sculpture/Installation and The Birks Bronze Medal.
I am a Boyband (2002) by Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay (6 min.)
Through four distinct media personae presented simultaneously, this video satirizes music video conventions and pushes them to new limits. One of the highlights of the production is an exquisitely sung 16th-century madrigal, accompanied by electro drumbeats and choreography.
Nemerofsky Ramsay is an award-winning visual and media artist based in Toronto and Berlin, whose single-channel video works have been screened in festivals and galleries in Canada, Europe and East Asia.
Devouring Buddha (2002) by Korbett Matthews (17 min.)
This moving meditation is about the victims of genocide in Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge regime whose souls were not dispatched according to Buddhist tradition, so they continue to wander the earth. Award-winning Matthews is a graduate student at Concordia University’s Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema and an assistant to the acclaimed Montreal documentarian Patricio Henriquez.
Right: Scene from Foxscape
Foxscape (2003) by Judith Doyle (5 min.)
This digital landscape chronicles urban wildlife and spectres of embodiment and death through filmed, drawn and animated imagery. A film and media artist, Doyle teaches integrated media at the Ontario College of Art & Design.
Mosaic (2003) by Christine Latimer (3 min.)
A televised boxing match begins to break up into digital patterns which take on swirling shapes of increasingly complex interference patterns until the original image of boxing is transformed.
Freeplay (2001) by Chantal Rousseau and Simone Moir (4 min.)
Omnipresent voyeuristic surveillance cameras provoke two young women to perform anonymously in front of them, putting on and taking off disguises while displaying their bodies, sensualities, perversities and humour. Moir has been touring internationally in the Productions ME de l’Art show of Unrehearsed Beauty for the past two years. Currently, she is developing a photographic series of public performance interventions.
Left: Scene from Ten Ways to Die in Hollywood
Ten Ways to Die in Hollywood (2003) by Jennifer Norton (10 min.)
Hollywood screen deaths, from suicides to random murders, are one of the most ludicrous cliches of the American image machine. This film condenses these arch endings into an hysterical “how-to” for aspiring actors. A video/electronic artist, Norton is a graduate of the Ontario College of Art & Design.
Grotesque (2002) by Wrik Mead (8 min.)
A fiery horned devil kills and dismembers a white swan, using the feathers and wings in an unsuccessful attempt to transform himself into an angel. Recognized as one of Canada’s most distinctive experimental filmmakers, Mead has begun to attract international attention for his singular work.
Die Mutter (2002) by Cliff Caines and Ryan Randall (34 min.)
As two men languish in luxury and fleshy delights, one recounts the tale of a man and a woman, in a post-apocalyptic landscape, attempting to care for a child. A seductive and elliptical story of storytelling.
Filmmaker’s Panel Discussion
Myles Bartlett, Judith Doyle, Christine Latimer, Simone Moir, Jennifer Norton, Ryan Randall and Chantal Rousseau will attend the screening and engage the audience in a discussion following.
- When: Thursday, Jan. 29, 6–9pm
- Where: Lecture Hall A, Computer Science & Engineering Building
Admission is free. For more information, call ext. 22174.
The above information was sent to YFile by Mary-Lou Schagena, publicist in York’s Faculty of Fine Arts.