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FROM THE FARM

FRIDAY 3 MARCH
2.30pm – 4.00pm
Tickets: £5
MAIN AUDITORIUM, HEART OF HAWICK – TOWER MILL

Films from the Independent Imaging Retreat (aka. Film Farm) offered in rural Ontario every summer by Canadian experimental filmmaker Philip Hoffman and his dedicated staff. Film Farm’s 22 years of handmade experimental filmmaking have deeply influenced the work of both Canadian and international filmmakers and have dramatically influenced the re-imagining and implementation of artist-centered models for the teaching and production of film. Curated by Sarah Bliss. Presented by Sarah Bliss and Phil Hoffman

Ghosts of Empire

Brett Kashmere / 00:08:00 / 2017 / United States / World Premiere

Ghost-poem and/or draft sketch for football horror film. Source footage is from a 1967 National Football League Films production titled They Call it Pro Football, which is a kind of ur-text of the NFL.

Biography/Filmography:

Brett Kashmere is a Canadian-born filmmaker living in Oakland, USA. Combining archival research with materialist aesthetics and hybrid forms, Kashmere’s work explores the intersection of history and (counter-) memory, sports, and popular culture. His films and videos have been exhibited internationally at festivals, museums, and microcinemas. Kashmere is currently a PhD student in Film + Digital Media at University of California, Santa Cruz. He is also the founding editor of INCITE: Journal of Experimental Media.

Brett Kashmere will be present for a Q&A


I Came For the Wedding

Pouyan Jafarizadeh Dezfoulian / 00:08:32 / 2009 / Canada / UK Premiere

This found footage film dives beneath the surface of the films it accesses (including “Blood of the Beasts” by George Franju and “In the Year of the Pig” by Emile de Antonio) to portray a transcendental world of agony and ecstasy. Music by Alex Unger. Film Farm 2009.

Biography/Filmography:

Born in Iran in 1980, Pouyan Jafarizadeh Dezfoulian has lived in Canada since 1995. He has studied Philosophy, Religion and Film. He has been working as an experimental filmmaker in Toronto for the past several years. He has won several awards for his haunting and beautiful film “Morning Will Come”, (2008) which played at the Los Angeles and Montreal film festivals and won the audience vote for the VTape Award at the 2009 Images Festival in Toronto and best experimental film at Cinesiege (2008). Pouyan is received currently completing his MFA in Film Production at York University.


Scratch

Deirdre Logue / 00:03:00 / 1998 / Canada / Scottish Premiere

The film conveys filmmaker’s physical insertion into nature, only this time the experience is not sensual release, rather it is a sadomasochistic and painful journey. Her body is treated like a piece of emulsion — processed, manipulated, scratched, cut to fit. “Scratch” is one of ten hand-processed performance-based works about childhood anxieties that make up Logue’s “Enlightened Nonsense” (1997-2000). Film Farm 1998.

Biography/Filmography:

Canadian artist Deirdre Logue’s compelling self-portraits investigate what it means to be a queer body in the age of anxiety, utilizing performance for the camera and self as subject. Logue has produced over 60 short films, videos and multi-channel art installations. She was a founding member of Media City, the Executive Director of the Images Festival, Executive Director of the CFMDC, and is currently Development Director at Vtape. Logue also directs F.A.G. Feminist Art Gallery with artist Allyson Mitchell


Minus

Chris Chan Fui Chong / 00:03:00 / 1999 / Canada / Scottish Premiere

The film is a hand-processed, uncut, singular stream of movements. To take away: either to leave remnants of light or to leave remnants of rhythms. Entirely hand-processed and unscathed by the blades of the splicer. This is Chong’s first 16mm film. Inspired by Ritchie Hawkin’s Concept albums. Film Farm 1999.

Biography/Filmography:

Christopher Chong Chan Fui is a Malaysian/Canadian filmmaker. He has written and directed a number of short films including “Tuesday Be My Friend” (2005) and has worked in film, television and animation production. Christopher’s career began in Canada where he directed a number of experimental hand-processed films and began screening his work in over 20 festivals on the global circuit. He was awarded Best Emerging Filmmaker in Toronto in 2001. His first feature, “Karaoke”, premiered at the 2009 Cannes Directors’ Fortnight and was awarded the Maverick Prize at the 2009 Calgary International Film Festival, Canada.


Passing Through

Karyn Sandlos / 00:12:00 / 1998 / Canada / Scottish Premiere

The film is haunted by a song about love and marriage that can’t be fully recalled – or completely forgotten. In this beautifully hand-processed film nothing seems to fit properly. The streets of a small, Ontario town become associative paths for memory when desire stretches the seams of expectation. Film Farm 1998.

Biography/Filmography:

Karyn Sandlos is a filmmaker, curator, writer and a PhD candidate in the Faculty of Education at York University in Toronto. She is co-editor (with Mike Hoolboom) of the volume of writing “First-Person Cinema and the Films of Philip Hoffman” (2001). Karyn is also Chair of the Board of Directors of the Images Festival of Independent Film and Video.


Your New Pig is Down the Road

Helen Hill / 00:04:49 / 2000 / Canada /

A cinematic love letter to Hill’s husband Paul Gailiunas. Hill beckons Paul Gailiunas to follow her down the road where Paul’s new pig waits. The film features their much loved daisies, their much respected Saint Francis, and their baby pig Daisy. After they were married, Paul Gailiunas and Helen Hill kept a pot bellied pig in New Orleans which they named Rosie. Film Farm 1999.

Biography/Filmography:

Helen Hill (1970 – 2007) was an American animation filmmaker and social activist who lived in New Orleans, Louisiana. She began creating short animated films at age eleven. She taught film animation at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (now NSCAD University), the Atlantic Filmmakers Cooperative (AFCOOP), the New Orleans Video Access Center (NOVAC) and the New Orleans Film Collective, which she co-founded. Her film Scratch and Crow (1995) was named by the Library of Congress to the National Film Registry, a list of aesthetically, historically, and culturally significant American motion pictures.


Holy Holes

Lillah Halla / 00:02:52 / 2016 / Canada / European Premiere

The slots and knotholes of the barn are “played” like a piano keyboard, in this lyrical celebration of form and texture. The music of the film bends and stretches, following the imperfections of the weatherbeaten barn boards.

Biography/Filmography:

Lillah Halla is a Brazilian filmmaker graduated from the International Film School EICTV in Cuba.  She’s part of the film Collective Vermelha (female filmmakers in Brazil) and Ensayo de Orquesta (Latin American filmmakers).  Lillah lives and works between Berlin and São Paulo.


The Shape of the Gaze

Maïa Cybelle Carpenter / 00:07:00 / 2000 / United States / Scottish Premiere

Optically printed, hand processed and painted: the film process is manipulated to disrupt viewing expectations on a textual and aesthetic level. This repositions the subject and discourse of gender ambiguity available in the gaze. By shifting the discourse of the gaze, the film implicates viewers in the gazes operating between the filmmaker and her self-identified lesbian butch subjects. Film Farm 2000.

Biography/Filmography:

Maïa Cybelle Carpenter is a moving image artist, curator and professional Executive Assistant. She joined the Board of Canyon Cinema in 2006 and is currently the President of the Board. Her films and videos have been exhibited internationally including Ars Electronica, Rotterdam International Film Festival, Anthology Film Archives, The British Film Institute, and PBS Television. She has served as a visiting curator for the Pleasure Dome in Toronto, was Programming Coordinator for MIX NYC at Anthology Film Archives, and a curator for SF Cinematheque. She has a BA in Women’s Studies/Film Theory from Barnard College, Columbia University and an MFA in Film from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has been on the Advisory Board of Lunafest since 2005.


Captifs D’Amour

John Greyson / 00:06:00 / 2010 / Canada / Scottish Premiere

Irony abounds in this split screen depiction of unjustified imprisonment. Greyson traces Jean Genet’s “Un Chant d’Amour”, with his own story of penguins held within the stone confines of the film farm barnyard. Film Farm 2009.

Biography/Filmography:

John Greyson is a filmmaker, video artist, writer, activist and educator whose productions have won accolades at festivals throughout the world. He is recipient of the 2000 Toronto Arts Award for film/video and the 2007 Bell Award in Video Art. His publications include “Urinal and Other Stories” (Power Plant/Art Metropole) and he is co-editor of “Queer Looks”, a critical anthology of gay/lesbian media theory (Routledge). He teaches film and video theory at York University.


Bull Fought

Matt Soar / 00:01:40 / 2011 / Canada / World Premiere

Bull Fought has its origins in a Super 8 vacation movie found in a Montreal thrift store. Soar’s direct animation counters the traditional narrative of the Spanish bullfight celebrated in the original footage, inverting winner and loser. Film Farm 2011.

Biography/Filmography:

Matt Soar is an intermedia artist inclined to cameraless filmmaking techniques. He teaches at Concordia University in Montreal. His ongoing project Lost Leaders explores film leaders as historical artifacts, analog metadata, and found footage.


Lot 22, Concession 5.

Penny McCann / 00:03:57 / 2009 / Canada / Scottish Premiere

Hand-processed 16mm film imagery, tinted, toned, and transformed, is combined with memory fragments of a rural past, to create a poetic narrative about place and time. Experimental sound design by Edmund Eagan and featuring the voice of McCann’s father, who passed away in 1992. The title of the film refers to the lot and concession number of McCann’s great-grandfather’s farm in Westport, Ontario, as recorded in the 1911 census. Film Farm 2008.

Biography/Filmography:

Canadian media artist Penny McCann’s body of work spans more than twenty-five years and encompasses both dramatic and experimental films and videos. Her work has been exhibited extensively at festivals and galleries nationally and internationally, including the Centre national d’art contemporain (France), the Hamburg Short Film Festival (Germany), the Molodist Kiev International Film Festival (Ukraine) and in Canada, at the Images Festival (Toronto), the Canadian Film Institute (Ottawa), and the Cinémathéque Québecoise (Montreal). Penny’s media artwork is distributed through CFMDC and Vtape in Toronto.


Hardwood Process

David Gatten / 00:13:00 / 1996 / Canada / Scottish Premiere

A history of scarred surfaces, an inquiry, and an imagining. For the marks we see and the marks we make, for the languages we can read and for those we are trying to learn. Reproduced by hand on an old contact printer resulting in individual, unique release prints. Film Farm 1996.

David Gatten will also present a programme of his films, with music and storytelling as part of Who Knows Where the Time Goes, Sat 4 March, 2-4pm.

David Gatten will be present for a Q&A

Biography/Filmography:

David Gatten explores the intersection of the printed word and moving image. His work illuminates a wide array of historical, conceptual and material concerns, while cataloging the variety of ways in which texts function in cinema as both language and image, often blurring the boundary between these categories. Using traditional research methods (reading old books) and non-traditional film processes (boiling old books) his films trace the contours of private lives and public histories, combining philosophy, biography and poetry with experiments in cinematic forms and narrative structures. His work resides in the permanent collections of the British Film Institute, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Austrian Film Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Cinémathèque Française, the Scottish Poetry Library and the Harvard Film Archive, as well as in numerous public and private collections.


A Day in the Shint

Clint Enns / 00:01:34 / 2013 / Canada / European Premiere

A film made at the 2013 Film Farm using the 2009 shint.

Biography/Filmography:

Clint Enns is a visual artist living in Toronto, Ontario. His work primarily deals with moving images created with broken and/or outdated technologies. His work has shown both nationally and internationally at festivals, alternative spaces and microcinemas. He has a Master’s degree in mathematics from the University of Manitoba, and has recently received a Master’s degree in cinema and media from York University where he is currently pursuing a PhD. His writings and interviews have appeared in Leonardo, Millennium Film Journal, Incite! Journal of Experimental Media and Spectacular Optical.