A night of Expanded Cinema, AudioVisual performances and films-

Margaret RorisonMargaret Rorison is a writer, curator and filmmaker from Baltimore, Maryland.

Rorison's work has been screened at various festivals and venues including Mono No Aware VI & VII, Brooklyn, NY; T.I.E. Alternative Measure’s, Colorado Springs, CO; 2013 Sonic Circuits Festival, Washington D.C.; Microscope Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; Eyebeam, New York, NY; The Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Russia; and The High Zero Festival, Baltimore, MD.

She is the co-founder and curator for a roaming experimental film series, Sight Unseen, partial member of the artist run film lab, LaborBerlin and holds an MFA from The Maryland Institute College of Art. She is also a member of The Red Room Collective and has been a member of The Maryland Film Festival Screening Committee since 2012.

Khristian WeeksI am an artist and improviser working in the fields of sound, kinetics, assemblage, and optics. My primary interest is in the process of discovery experienced through observation and experimentation. Playing a fundamental role in my creative processes as well as in their realization is the use of silence, non-intention, and natural forces to produce self-sustaining systems of movement, sound, and optical phenomena such as shadow, caustics, reflection, refraction, and projection.

Stephen Broomer in person

Fresh out of screenings at TIFF Wavelengths, Views from the Avant Garde and Migrating Forms, Open City Cinema is proud to bring Toronto experimental filmmaker Stephen Broomer to Winnipeg to present a program of his meticulous and visually stunning films.

Broomer will be on hand to introduce his program and answer audience questions, and will also present a program of contemporary Toronto experimental works that he has curated.

White Light Cinema and The Nightingale Present

The experimental film community lost one of its most original and distinctive voices last fall with the passing of Framingham, Massachusetts Super-8 filmmaker Anne Charlotte Robertson. Robertson’s films (and later digital videos) were visceral, haunting, emotionally raw works that opened up the artist’s life and her anxieties, obsessions, compulsions, addictions, and mental illness in unprecedented ways. Robertson’s films, now housed at Harvard Film Archive, are powerful documents of maintaining oneself with art, sharply incisive self-analysis, and caustic wit while struggling with an often times debilitating illness. 

White Light Cinema is proud to present a selection of five early works by Robertson (whose films have not been seen in Chicago in well over a decade, and only a handful of times before that), in new digital transfers. [Robertson rarely screened her originals, and only when she was present. The previous solo show of Robertson’s work in Chicago, which I was fortunate to present at Chicago Filmmakers, was from VHS.]

These are startlingly moving works about the fragility and resilience of the human spirit. Robertson’s legacy is a remarkably brave example of really living life through art. 

KLEX and FINDARS co-present:

Experimental film screening and performance from Japan. Shinkan Tamaki from Japan will perform and present the screening programme in person!

Film Screening:

- Experience in Material No.51: DUBHOUSE (Kei Shichiri & Ryoji Suzuki, 16min, 2012)A documentary that focuses on an installation called "Experience in Material No.51: DUBHOUSE" by architect Ryoji SUZUKI at the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo in 2010. Its original concept of capturing the darkness produced by architecture was dramatically altered by the Great East Japan Earthquake of March 11th, 2011. SHICHIRI begins by filming both the light and shadows produced by the works on display, and embeds SUZUKI’s drawings of the disaster-hit regions within them. Cinemas are architectural structures where darkness is inherent. Films that attempt to emerge from that darkness are a form of emitted light, and at the same time they could be seen as a type of prayer. This is a metafilm on the subject of light and darkness, as well as a response to a historical event.

- A Child Goes Burying Dead Insects (Rei Hayama, 12min, 2009)A Child Goes Burying Dead Insects (Kodomo ga Mushi no Shigai wo Umeni Iku ) is the first film work by Rei Hayama. The repeated sequence of -one girl appears in the woods, buries dead insects and then leaves- was made without camera. With each duplicate repetition breaks the film images and fades its color. The girl in film was also performed by filmmaker herself. The film is structural but also has narrative.

- Generator (Makino Takashi, 20min, 2012)The images reach realms beyond our comprehension as they transform and invite us into our own personal memories. Filled with uncertain yet overwhelmingly reminiscent images, the film opens up before our eyes. When the unfixed transformations of light eventually shift into aerial shots, images capable of mutual recognition, we are able to transcend ‘the body’ and ‘personal recollections’ into inter-personal memories that reach back into our ancestral imagination. We may be able to feel as living beings a part of our star for the first time if we recognize our ‘body’ as a small universe, realise our city as an enormous living body and ourselves as merely one cell.

- Passages (Shinkan Tamaki, 12min, 2013) with live improvised music by Reflex Reactions (YONG Yandsen & KOK Siew Wai)The winds asked me to go on a journey.

Live Audio-visual Performances: 

- ULTRA spectrum / Shinkan Tamaki

- WONG Eng Leong (video) and GOH Lee Kwang (music)