Cléo Sallis-Parchet, a PhD student in Cinema & Media Studies in York University’s School of the Arts, Media, Performance & Design (AMPD) has curated a new exhibition at the TIFF Lightbox in Toronto that highlights the groundbreaking 1973 Women & Film International Festival. The exhibition, titled A Feminist Lens, showcases rare archival materials from the festival, which have been hidden for nearly 50 years.
Held in Toronto, the 1973 festival was a pioneering event that showcased films made by women, including directors like Agnès Varda, Alice Guy-Blaché and Alanis Obomsawin. Despite its significance, the festival remained largely unknown until recently.
Sallis-Parchet credits her time at AMPD for shaping her approach to creating this exhibition. “I stumbled upon a box of old tapes donated by Suzanne Depoe, a co-founder of the festival,” Sallis-Parchet explains. “At the time, I was training in media preservation, learning how to digitize various formats of videotapes. This box revealed an incredibly rich archive of media and ephemera documenting a groundbreaking event and tour across the country.”
Over the next two years, Sallis-Parchet worked to digitize, restore and curate the materials, including Super 8 films, open-reel video, photographs, newspaper clippings and more. Her efforts were supported by the Archive/Counter-Archive research network and her PhD supervisor, Janine Marchessault. This work is part of Sallis-Parchet's broader research on feminist film history and media preservation.
“The archival process has allowed me to discover an important feminist legacy that, unfortunately, still remains overlooked in public, academic and historical knowledge,” she says. “By engaging with these materials, I’ve been able to transform and reawaken lost history.”
For more information about the exhibition and showtimes, visit TIFF.net.