Event

MAY 28: DOORS OPEN TORONTO AT THE COMMONS @ 401!

MAY 28: DOORS OPEN TORONTO AT THE COMMONS @ 401!

Blooming Intimacies
The Commons @ 401 Film Program
Bachir/Yerex Presentation Space
The Commons @ 401, 4th floor, 401 Richmond Street West
10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Curated by Kelly Lui & Kaitlynn Tomaselli

Total running time: 32 mins; all ages

FADO, imagineNATIVE, Reel Asian, SAVAC, and Vtape, collectively known as The Commons @ 401, are pleased to present Blooming Intimacies: The Commons @ 401 Film Curation for this year’s city-wide Doors Open event. We invite drop-in visitors into the Bachir Yerex Presentation Space to view a rotation of films hand-picked by this year’s leading curators, Kelly Lui and Kaitlynn Tomaselli.

Blooming Intimacies brings together films that represent the relations formed within The Commons. Revisiting past works alongside recent ones, this program weaves notions of intimacy and blooming collectiveness that reflect upon our stories, lands, communities, and traditions.

Whether through the sweeping motion of a broom or in the moment of collective suspense before rainfall, these artists contemplate film as a process and record for witnessing transference, growing feelings, and ecological relations.

Together, we celebrate the abundance of artistic realities.

 

Tengri
(Director: Alisi Telengut | Canada | 2012 | 5:34 min | Mongolia | Experimental Short)
Wind burial, influenced by Shamanism, is an old Mongolian tradition. When someone dies, the corpse is carried on a cart until a bump causes the body to fall. The place where the corpse lands becomes a simple tomb.
Alisi Telengut is a Canadian artist of Mongolian origin. She creates animation frame by frame under the camera with mixed media to generate movement, and explore hand-made and painterly visuals for her films.

The Rain After 
(Director: Mohammad Fauzi | Indonesia | 2014 |  12:06 min | No dialogue | Experimental Short)
The Rain After explores this relationship in the midst of producing an image. For the duration of the film, a group of children in a residential area in Jakarta pose in front of the video camera in a manner that subjects typically pose for still images.
Mohammad Fauzi is a researcher and filmmaker. His work has been shown in OK. Video “FLESH” 5th Jakarta International Video Festival, Indonesia Art Festival, Hamburg International Short Film Festival, ARKIPEL Jakarta International Documentary & Experimental Film Festival, and BFI London Film Festival.

Maigre Dog 
(Director: Donna James | Canada | 1990 | 7:50 min | No Dialogue | Experimental Short)
Maigre Dog celebrates the Jamaican women who nurtured Donna James and surrounded her with their vernacular language. The tape reveals layers of thought, whispers of memories, circles of knowing, which together evoke the complexity of the life process.
Donna James was born in Kingston, Jamaica in 1960. Her work often focuses on reconciling loss through personal exploration, and a re-examination of storytelling and oral history using interviews as a dialectic tool.

STAND-SIT-LIE
(Director: Gustaf Broms | Sweden | 2020 | 4:30 min | No Dialogue | Experimental Short)
The film features Old Tjikko at Fulufjället in northern Sweden, considered by some one of the oldest living trees with a root system that dates about 9,600 years. Standing with the tree at sunrise brought on thoughts regarding being in our different bodies. How does mobility shape the experience of worlds?
Gustaf Broms is a Swedish visual artist working in performance, video and photography. His practice is engaged with the exploration of the nature of consciousness, the dualistic concept of “I,” as the biological reality of being in the BODY, and being MIND, as the perceived experience of the flow of phenomena.

Odehimin
(Director: Kijâtai-Alexandra Veillette-Cheezo | Canada | 2019 |  2:45 min | French/Anishinaabe w/English Subtitles | Experimental Short)
A stunning and poetic reminder of the importance of self-love and acceptance through the odehimin (heart berry) teaching.
Kijâtai Veillette-Cheezo is an artist/activist born in Val-d’Or, Quebec. As an emerging filmmaker, they create work that reflects Indigenous realities while working to build bridges between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people

 

The Commons @ 401 is a shared-space initiative of five non-profit arts organizations: FADO Performance Art Centre; imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival; SAVAC (South Asian Visual Arts Centre); Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival; and Vtape. Occupying the west end of 401 Richmond’s fourth floor, The Commons represents the largest tenant-led renovation in the building’s history. It contains offices for each organization, as well as shared, publicly accessible multipurpose spaces, including The Bachir/Yerex Presentation Space, a research centre, a meeting room, and a social and reception area.

Image Credit: Tengri (Alisi Telengut, 2012)

 

co-presented with FADO Performance Art Centre, imagineNATIVE Film + Media Art Festival, South Asian Visual Arts Centre (SAVAC), and Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival