Images Festival 2021
May 29–June 11, 2021
e-flux Video & Film announces Festival Forum, a new series presenting collaborations with established and emerging moving-image festivals from around the world. The series aims to promote a closer dialogue between the artistically entangled but often institutionally disconnected fields of film and contemporary art, and explore field-specific approaches to programming and/or curating the moving image. Over time it hopes to accumulate a record of, and insight into, the formal, topical, geographical, political, and institutional considerations at stake in the presentation and dissemination of moving-image works today.
We are very pleased to inaugurate this series with a focus on Toronto’s Images Festival, which just wrapped its 34th edition featuring a program of premieres, screenings, ongoing exhibitions, and talks presented entirely online.
For this special feature on e-flux Video & Film, Images Festival 2021 programmers Alia Ayman, Robert Lee, and Yasmin Nurming-Por discuss this year’s edition with e-flux’s Lukas Brasiskis, and present six picks from the festival for e-flux audiences.
With films by Rossella Biscotti, Grau, Darol Olu Kae, Nour Ouayda, Suneil Sanzgiri, and Rina B. Tsou, screening on e-flux Video & Film from Saturday, May 29 through Friday, June 11, 2021.
Watch them here.
Featured Films
Saturday, May 29 – Friday, June 11, 2021
Rina B. Tsou, The Horrible Thirty: Me, My Father and Richard the Tiger, 2018
Taiwan, 20 minutes
As she nears the age of 30, Rina tries to find, with some difficulty, a path to becoming a film director. This year, her father, Richard, whom she misses dearly, sends his Chinese zodiac sign, the tiger, to silently listen and follow his daughter through her unsteady sounds of life. Through the medium of film, we distantly imagine what the world was like in the 1950s, when he himself was 30.
Darol Olu Kae, I ran from it and was still in it, 2020
US, 11 minutes
A poetic meditation on familial loss and separation, and the love that endures against dispersion. Kae repurposes materials sourced online and pairs them with images from his personal archive in an effort to wade through the deep emotions surrounding his father’s death and the sudden relocation of his children, collapsing time and memory in the process. Taking the autobiographical model as his jumping-off point, Kae explores how an intimate account of one’s life can potentially extend beyond the personal.
Grau, History of Light, 2020
US, 7 minutes
A human being vanishes in real time.
I began to wonder if I was disappearing. I was afraid of what would be left of me. Close your eyes and pay attention to what your body is doing. The speed of your breath. How would it feel for that breath to leave you? This is being embodied, too.
Suneil Sanzgiri, Letter From Your Far-Off Country, 2020
US/India, 18 minutes
Drawing upon a rich repository of images—from digital renderings of Kashmir’s mountains to the textured materiality of 16mm hand-processing and direct animation techniques—Letter From Your Far-Off Country maps a hidden vein of shared political commitment and diasporic creative expression, linking a poem by the Kashmiri American writer Agha Shahid Ali with interviews with the filmmaker’s father and a letter addressed to Communist Party leader Prabhakar Sanzgiri, who is also the filmmaker’s distant relative.
Rossella Biscotti, Disorientation Notes, 2020
Belgium, 8 minutes
Within a subtle weaving of video and sound, a voice is taking us through technical ways to reorient ourselves and balance instability while in movement. Referring to distant, unstable landmarks, as well as mapping and GPS technologies, we constantly look for ways to position ourselves in relation to an environment that changes, second by second.
Nour Ouayda, Towards the Sun, 2019
Lebanon, 17 minutes
You are now in the main hall of the National Museum in Beirut. A guard reminds you that you are encouraged to touch the archeological objects. A voice in your headset suggests that you lick the stone. You are now facing a hole in the wall on the lower left corner of a mosaic. The voice in your headset indicates that it was made by a sniper. Out of curiosity, you dial 1-9-9-1 to listen to the rest of the story.
Alia Ayman, Robert Lee, and Yasmin Nurming-Por in conversation with Lukas Brasiskis
Recorded video discussion, 35 minutes
As with last year’s 33rd edition, the 34th edition of Images Festival was presented entirely online. In their programming note for Images Festival 2021, the programming collective (Alia Ayman, Sara Constant, Robert Lee, and Yasmin Nurming-Por) wrote: “As four strangers brought together to envision this year’s program, our thinking has been informed by the conditions of isolation and uncertainty that have become hallmarks of our realities after the world went virtual last spring. As the days melt into one another, creating a long continuum of sameness, we found inspiration in the idea and practice of repetition. Between what occurred and what is yet to come is an endless loop of recurrence, in which the same patterns resurface and structural limitations threaten to restrict and homogenize our thinking about what’s possible. But repetition is never exact, and while patterns are generally stifling, they can also become ways through which we can imagine alternatives.”
In this recoded interview, programmers Alia Ayman, Robert Lee, and Yasmin Nurming-Por discuss this year’s edition with e-flux Video & Film associate curator Lukas Brasiskis, including the ideas and intentions that shaped their programming, the challenges of collaborating remotely, and the films they picked for e-flux audiences.
About Images Festival
Images Festival is an artist-driven festival presenting independent film and media culture in dialogue with contemporary art. Created in 1987 as an alternative to the only other Toronto film festival at the time, Images has spent the last 34 years presenting works that are challenging in their form and content. Images showcases the intersection of emerging and established practices and invites open critical dialogue in the film and media arts community around the political herstories of moving-image production, distribution, exhibition, and representation. Today the festival is one of the most enduring platforms in the world for the exhibition and discourse of independent film and media art, and includes screenings, exhibitions, performances, educational initiatives, and online presentations. (imagesfestival.com)
For more information, contact program [at] e-flux.com.
