The 2015 Toronto International Film Festival Wavelengths program will present 54 films, videos and installations by some of the world’s most influential auteurs and artists who challenge conventional expression and seek to redefine the art of cinema. Curated by Andréa Picard, with contributions from members of TIFF’s international programming team, Wavelengths comprises experimental film and video art, category-defying feature-length films — many of which flout the traditional fact-fiction boundaries and opt instead for cinema at its most expansive — and immersive, captivating installations, which redefine the potential for moving image art.
The 2015 edition features a seductive mix of master filmmakers, award-winning artists and emerging, new talent. Some of the highlights include the critical hit of this year’s Cannes, Miguel Gomes’ breathtakingly inventive, three-part Arabian Nights; disarmingly intimate dialogue-portraits by iconic and iconoclastic auteurs Chantal Akerman and Tsai Ming-liang, respectively; a major new montage film by Ukrainian master, Sergei Loznitsa; World Premieres by Nicolás Pereda, Pablo Agüero, and Mark Lewis; and two important works from a new Italian cinema, Pietro Marcello’s exquisite Bella e perduta, and Roberto Minervini’s powerful and all-too prescient The Other Side.
“This year’s Wavelengths is marked by a certain youthful exuberance — one that is caught up in the contradiction of exhibiting energy, inventiveness and ample daring, while taking stock of the world’s various states of emergency, on large levels and intimate scales,” said Picard.“With renewed faith in the image — abstract ones, even frail ones, and those stemming from reality, remembrance or imagination — the filmmakers and artists in this year’s program are actively proving cinema’s singular ability to engage with collective, individual, social and political memory.”
Additional highlights of this year’s program include a new short and feature-length film by British filmmaker and artist Ben Rivers; the Festival’s first appearance by this year’s Baloise Art Prize winners, UK artist Beatrice Gibson and French artist Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc; the Abraaj Art Prize winner Yto Barrada; new works by emerging filmmaking talents, Lois Patiño and Nelson Carlo de los
Santos Arias; a record number of Canadian (and Toronto) contributions, including the World Premiere of a major new film by Montreal-based experimental filmmaker Daïchi Saïto and two recent discoveries presented in restored archival prints of films by Paul Sharits and by Philippe Garrel.
New to Wavelengths this year, works outside the cinema include the latest installation by Indian-American filmmaker Shambhavi Kaul; a lecture-performance by Toronto-based artist Annie MacDonell and French artist Maïder Fortuné originally commissioned by Le Centre Pompidou’s Hors Pistes festival; and TIFF’s first collaboration with the Art Gallery of Ontario to present lauded Thai filmmaker and artist, Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s installation, Fireworks (Archives), as well as a new work by Corin Sworn and Tony Romano.
Wavelengths 1: Fire in the Brain
Like a fire in the brain that lights up perceptive powers, this programme is a seductively surreal visual exploration of the relationship between image, sound, and movement.
3D Movie Paul Sharits, USA (restored archival print courtesy of Anthology Film Archives)
Fugue Kerstin Schroedinger, Canada/Germany
Prima Materia Charlotte Pryce, USA
The Fire in My Brain That Separates Us Benjamin Ramírez Pérez, Germany
Something Horizontal Blake Williams, Canada/USA
The Exquisite Corpus Peter Tscherkassky, Austria
Wavelengths 2: YOLO
Subjective experience is channeled through artistic collaborations in this programme, which offers YOLO-infused reflections on identity and contemporary dislocation.
A Distant Episode Ben Rivers, UK
An Old Dog’s Diary Shai Heredia and Shumona Goel, India
The Reminder Behrouz Rae, USA
Solo for Rich Man Beatrice Gibson, UK
YOLO Ben Russell, USA/South Africa
Analysis of Emotions and Vexations Wojcieck Bąkowski, Poland
Bunte Kuh Parastoo Anoushahpour, Faraz Anoushahpour and Ryan Ferko, Canada/Germany
Wavelengths 3: Light Space Modulator
This program explores ways of recording and reshaping space with light, of measuring and mapping our bodily presence and impact vis-à-vis regional, global and abstracted cartographies.
Navigator Björn Kämmerer, Austria/Germany
Théodolitique David K. Ross, Canada
Office Space Modulation Terrarea (Janis Demkiw, Emily Hogg, Olia Mishchenko) Canada
Palms Mary Helena Clark, Canada/USA
Occidente Ana Vaz, France/Portugal
Terrestrial Calum Walter, USA
Tarlabaşı Cynthia Madansky,Turkey
Wavelengths 4: Psychic Driving
Is now a time for outrage? This program of political statements and personal inquiries breathes new life into the politics of the image.
Actua1 Philippe Garrel, France (restored archival print courtesy of La Cinémathèque française)
Time for Outrage! Friedl vom Gröller, Austria
Untitled Behrouz Rae, USA
Many Thousands Gone Ephraim Asili, Brazil/USA
Neither God nor Santa Maria Samuel M. Delgado and Helena Girón, Spain
Psychic Driving William E. Jones, USA
UNcirCling John Creson and Adam Rosen, Canada
Engram of Returning Daïchi Saïto, Canada
PAIRINGS
Night without distance (Noite Sem Distância)
Lois Patiño, Spain/Portugal North American Premiere
An instant in the memory of a landscape: the smuggling that for centuries crossed the line between Portugal and Galicia. The Gerês Mountains knows no borders, and rocks cross from one country to another with insolence. Smugglers also disobey this separation. The rocks, river, and trees: silent witnesses to help them to hide.
Night without distance precedes previously announced feature-film, Minotaur by Nicolás Pereda.
Santa Teresa and Other Stories (Santa Teresa y Otras Historias)
Nelson Carlo de los Santos Arias
Mexico/Dominican Republic/USA North American Premiere
Dominican filmmaker Nelson Carlo de los Santos Arias radically extrapolates from Roberto Bolaño’s unfinished, posthumous novel 2666, to produce a baroque fictionalized account of Ciudad Juárez. This noir-tinged tale soon begins to dovetail and intersect with a host of other stories recounted by a chorus of disembodied voices, creating a narrative palimpsest that blurs the line between factual documentation, lyrical observation, and fictional imagination.
Preceded by:
Paradox of Praxis 5
Francis Alÿs, Mexico International Premiere
The latest in Belgian-born, Mexico City-based contemporary artist Francis Alÿs’ series of performative videos that politicize absurd or seemingly futile gestures, Paradox of Praxis 5 documents the artist’s nocturnal perambulations through Juárez as he kicks a ball of fire along the city’s desolate streets. Transcending metaphor, the eerie, mobile conflagration traces out an imaginary map of a devastated city.
Sector IX B (Secteur IX B)
Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc, France/Senegal North American Premiere
Taking inspiration from L’Afrique fantôme — the controversial diary by surrealist writer Michel Leiris recounting his participation in the ambitious French ethnographic expedition of the 1930s to Dakar and Djibouti — Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc’s arresting first feature reflects on identity, cultural appropriation, and the transference of memory though objects.
Preceded by:
Faux Départ (False Start)
Yto Barrada, Morocco/USA North American Premiere
The latest film by French-Moroccan artist Yto Barrada observes the elaborate fossil industry in Morocco. Paying homage to the “preparators” in the arid region between the Atlas Mountains and the Sahara Desert, whose intrepid work is fueling a thriving trade in artifacts real, faux and hybrid, False Start is a rebuke to the fetishistic thirst for foreign objects, a sly meditation on authenticity, and a paean to creativity.
Previously announced was the pairing of Isiah Medina’s 88:88 preceded by Denis Côté’s short film May We Sleep Soundly.
FEATURES
Afternoon (Na ri xia wu)
Tsai Ming-liang, Taiwan North American Premiere
A disarmingly candid, insightful and ultimately very moving conversation between Taiwanese auteur Tsai Ming-liang and his muse, actor Lee Kang-sheng, whose storied relationship represents one of the great collaborations in cinema history.
Arabian Nights: The Restless One
Miguel Gomes, Portugal/France/Germany/Switzerland North American Premiere
A major hit at this year’s Cannes, this epic, three-part contemporary fable by Portuguese auteur Miguel Gomes (Tabu) adopts the structure from the Arabian Nights texts in order to explore Portugal’s plunge into austerity. The first volume of this thrillingly inventive and wildly ambitious triptych includes appearances by cunning wasps, virgin mermaids, an exploding whale, erection-inducing potions and a talking rooster.
Arabian Nights: The Desolate One
Miguel Gomes, Portugal/France/Germany/Switzerland North American Premiere
Part Two of Portuguese auteur Miguel Gomes’ majestic, mutating modern-day folk tale relates how desolation has invaded humanity through stories involving a distressed judge on a night of three moons, a runaway, a teleporting murderer, a wounded cow, a sad, chain-smoking couple in a concrete apartment block, and a ghost dog named Dixie.
Arabian Nights: The Enchanted One
Miguel Gomes, Portugal/France/Germany/Switzerland North American Premiere
The third and concluding volume of Portuguese auteur Miguel Gomes’ Scheherazadean triptych brings this epic to a close with the sound of birdsong and the promise of the ineffable.
Eva Doesn’t Sleep
Pablo Agüero, France/Argentina/Spain World Premiere
One of Argentina’s most visionary and politically engaged cinematic voices, director Pablo Agüero takes the unbelievable story of the transport of the embalmed body of beloved First Lady Eva Perón, and transforms it into a strangely riveting cinema experience, with a supremely creepy performance from Gael García Bernal.
The Event
Sergei Loznitsa, Netherlands/Belgium North American Premiere
Ukrainian filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa follows his monumental documentary Maïdan with this found-footage epic about the failed coup of August 1991 that signaled the fall of the Soviet Union.
Lost and Beautiful (Bella e perduta)
Pietro Marcello, Italy North American Premiere (pictured in main image above)
Part fable, part documentary, part film poem, the latest exquisite feature by Pietro Marcello (La bocca del lupo) pays homage to a humble shepherd who became a symbol of hope and generosity for a struggling and conflicted Italy.
No Home Movie
Chantal Akerman, Belgium North American Premiere
Shuttling between fiction, adaptation, documentary and essay film, Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman has created one of the most original, daring and influential oeuvres in film history. No Home Movie is a sober, profoundly moving portrait of Akerman’s mother in the months leading up to her death, when she was mostly confined to her Brussels apartment. A Polish Jew who survived Auschwitz, her mother suffered from chronic anxiety, an affliction that shaped Akerman’s thematic preoccupations with gender, sex, cultural identity, existential ennui, solitude and mania.
The Other Side
Roberto Minervini, France/Italy North American Premiere
In turns tender and disturbing, Italian filmmaker Roberto Minervini produces a powerful hybrid docu-fiction film, profiling drug addicts and private militia in Louisiana, who live on the fringes of society.
The Sky Trembles and the Earth is Afraid and the Two Eyes Are Not Brothers
Ben Rivers, United Kingdom North American Premiere
Partially inspired by Paul Bowles’ short story A Distant Episode, the latest feature by British filmmaker Ben Rivers (Two Years at Sea, A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness) charts a mysterious transformation from observational making-of to inventive adaptation shot against a staggering Moroccan landscape.
Previously announced feature films include Mark Lewis’ Invention, and Evan Johnson and Guy Maddin’s The Forbidden Room.
INSTALLATIONS
Fallen Objects
Shambhavi Kaul, USA/India World Premiere
Presented in partnership with Scrap Metal Gallery from September 10-20, this new installation by Indian-American artist-filmmaker Shambhavi Kaul is comprised of a large projected video loop composed of seven shots that continuously rearrange themselves based on an internal code, and floorbound sculptures in the form of scraps of cloth — the “fallen objects” of the title. Stripping away the narrative potential of its genre cinema-derived source material, Fallen Objects considers cinematic space outside the cinema and imagines humans inside it.
Fireworks (Archives)
Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand/Mexico Canadian Premiere
Presented in partnership with the Art Gallery of Ontario from September 10-27 (Closed on Mondays), the new installation from Palme d’Or-winning Thai filmmaker and contemporary artist Apichatpong Weerasethakul fuses the artist’s exploration of memory, ephemeral elements like light and phantoms, and the malleable nature of history and storytelling while exhuming Thailand’s political legacy through an ingenious use of pyrotechnics.
Previously announced programming includes the lecture-performance, Stories Are Meaning-Making Machines by Annie MacDonell and Maïder Fortuné; and film installations La Giubba by Corin Sworn and Tony Romano; The Forbidden Room – A Living Poster by Galen Johnson; and Bring me the Head of Tim Horton by Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson and Galen Johnson.
The 40th Toronto International Film Festival runs September 10 to 20, 2015.