Watch Online Free: Thursday, Oct 26 (24hrs)

A Chant for the Bees

Bill Burns | 2022 | Canada | 7 min | W Cdn Premiere

A Chant for the Bees is a short film about my daily life. It contains a series of ordinary events as well as a visit to the amusement park. Original music is in the form of a Georgian chant of the names of the 100 largest companies in the world.

Bill Burns was born into a bookselling family in Saskatchewan where he learned about books and art and tractors from monks, poets and farmers. His work about advanced industrialism, donkeys, goat’s milk, salt, safety gear and honey bees has been shown at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, Museum of Modern Art, New York, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, Mendes Wood Gallery, Sao Paulo, 303 Gallery, New York, Seoul Museum of Art and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.

He has published artists’ books with publishers in Canada, Germany, USA, UK, Austria and Denmark. His most recent titles include A Book About the Power 100, published by Verlag Mark Pezinger, Vienna (2018) and Hans Ulrich Obrist Hear Us, published by YYZ BOOKS and Black Dog Publishing, London (2016). His artists’ editions are included in collections at Tate Britain, London, the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Getty Center, Los Angeles. Mr Burns is also Artistic Director of the Dogs and Boats and Airplanes Experimental Children’s Choir. The choir has produced live performances and audio works at festivals in Australia, Argentina, the UK and Canada.

Minutes

Matthew Wolkow | 2023 | Canada | 5 min | World Premiere

It’s a bird in the air, a bird that lands… The deep mystery, the promise of life… It’s nothing at all. – Jobim/Moustaki 

At once simple, profound and light-hearted, Minutes is a play on words; a deliberative game and puzzle.

Driven by a curiosity for knowledge, Matthew Wolkow creates a cinema revealing the persons he meets and the stories that come along. Situated between essay and experimentation, rubbing the real, the imaginary, speech, words, music and sensorialities, his work benefits from this hybridity where form is approached as a resolution. In October 2021, the Cinémathèque Québécoise screened his first retrospective.

The falcon cannot hear the falconer

Oona Taper | 2022 | USA | 8 min | Cdn Premiere

A woman is plagued by vultures. She struggles to rid her home of them while confronting her own ideas about nature, empathy and human-animal communication. This film combining 16mm footage and ink animation uses layers of imagery and media to create interwoven visual metaphors.

Oona Taper creates films, installations and animations that are invested in the materiality of moving images to create tactile and embodied experiences for the viewer. Her work responds to current and historical events with whimsy and daydreams to contend with the constant mundane apocalypses of the modern world.

Niebla REDUX

Paul Tarragó | 2023 | UK | 9 min | NA Premiere

The fourth episode of “The Variations,” featuring two more adverts, considerations of the future, a multiple projection spectacular in miniature, a riverine jaunt and—in all honesty—quite a lot more… (This is a special one-off version including a *bonus* get-you-up-to-speed prologue!)

Paul Tarragó is a filmmaker, using both video and celluloid, living in London. His work? A mix of underground experimentation and metafiction, tugging at the leash of film language but with narrative often held close at hand. His work has shown widely on film festival and gallery circuits (International Film Festival Rotterdam, NYUFF, EMAF, National Review of Live Art, Triangle France, Kino der Kunst) and includes several award winning experimental narratives, video installation, a collaborative feature film, cinematic sketchbooks, moving image and live soundtrack performance, etc. A formative influence on his DIY approach comes from his experiences (from 1993–2006) as a core member and activist with the Exploding Cinema, a collective dedicated to originating alternative methods of exhibition for low-budget/artists' film and video and related performance.

electric moonlight & the language within the leaves

Takahiro Suzuki | 2023 | USA | 8 min | Cdn Premiere

A modern re-telling of the Japanese tale of the bamboo cutter and the moon princess. The moon princess listens to the untold intelligence of the cosmos as observed by trees to become closer with and eventually return home.

Takahiro Suzuki is an artist currently residing in Portland ME.  He completed a BA in Studio Art from the University of Virginia concentrating on photography and cinematography, and received an MFA in Film, Video, Animation and New Genres from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. His work and research practices as an artist serve as a form of inquiry. Each investigation offers a path toward further curiosity, rather than a grasp toward certainty. The end product for his works is not so much a thesis upon which to land, but rather, an open hypothesis for the audience to consider. His films have exhibited and screened nationally and internationally. Suzuki also serves as the co-founder and co-curator of aCinema, a collaboration with Janelle VanderKelen which presents experimental film and video screenings at Woodland Pattern Book Center in Milwaukee WI.

The Song

Bani Abidi | 2022 | UK/Germany | 20 min | NA Premiere

An elderly refugee, recently arrived in a new and unfamiliar European city, confronts the isolation of his new apartment by creating his own soundscapes to recreate what is familiar and reassuring.

Bani Abidi lives and works in Karachi and Berlin. Her practice incorporates film, photography and drawing, reflecting on problems of nationalism and borders, and how such issues affect everyday life and individual experience. She has exhibited extensively internationally and her work can be found in collections including TATE and the British Museum, London, MOMA and the Guggenheim Museum, New York and the Sharjah Art Foundation.