2017 Toronto International Film Festival Unveils Wavelengths Program of 40 Avant-Garde Films

The Toronto International Film Festival’s 17th edition of Wavelengths — its uncompromising, carefully curated, avant-garde showcase — will feature 40 films, which unite internationally celebrated and emerging artists with some of today’s most important, influential and risk-taking filmmakers. Wavelengths is comprised of four programs of experimental short films and videos, three resonant pairings, and nine stand-alone features — each displaying its own radical approach to the art of cinema.

Some of the highlights include Véréna Paravel and Lucien CastaingTaylor’s gripping and unsettling work of sensory ethnography, Caniba, about the notorious Japanese cannibal Issei Sagawa and his remarkable relationship with his brother; Narimane Mari’s category-defying follow-up to her debut feature, Bloody Beans, Le Fort des fous, a scathing, subversive and shape-shifting indictment of European colonialism, past and present; Ben Russell’s exquisite, intercontinental mining documentary Good Luck, shot in Super 16mm in Serbia and Suriname; and Pedro Pinho’s FIPRESCI winning, left-leaning The Nothing Factory, which premiered at this year’s Quinzaine des réalisateurs.

Wavelengths will also present the innovative 3D feature PROTOTYPE by Toronto-based Wavelengths alumnus Blake Williams; Occidental, the neo(n)-noir second feature by acclaimed contemporary artist-filmmaker Neïl Beloufa; and Dragonfly Eyes (蜻蜓之眼), the CCTV-sourced feature debut by leading Chinese artist Xu Bing. Other highlights include the World Premiere of Anna Marziano’s deeply moving and mysterious essay-film Beyond the One (Al di là dell’uno), as well as new films by master filmmakers Bruno Dumont and Denis Côté.

The programme also features Wang Bing’s powerful, sobering and intimate Mrs. Fang, about a woman with Alzheimer’s dying days in a southern village in China, and Nelson Carlo de los Santos Arias’ astonishing Cocote, which follows an evangelical gardener’s eye-opening homecoming as he attends his father’s funeral and grapples with religious belief and ritual. Both were recent winners at the 70th Locarno International Film Festival, where they received the Golden Leopard for Best Film and the Signs of Life Award, respectively.

Short-film highlights include terrific new films and videos by Michael Robinson, Rosa Barba, Fern Silva, Wojciech Bąkowski, Jodie Mack, Laura Huertas Millán, Baloise Art Prize–winner Sara Cwynar, local performance artist Francesco Gagliardi, Dan Browne, Yoni Brook and Pacho Velez, Luis López Carrasco, Helga Fanderl, Friedl vom Gröller, Dane Komljen, André Lehmann, Kazik Radwanski and more.

As always, Wavelengths will include historical work; this year’s archival selections are Florence (1970), by the late Finnish computer-art maverick and electronic musician Erkki Kurenniemi, and disarming diarist Anne Charlotte Robertson’s Pixillation (1976), which was recently restored by the Harvard Film Archive. A number of filmmakers included in this year’s Whitney Biennial will also present films at Wavelengths, including Dani Leventhal and Sheilah Wilson, Kevin Jerome Everson and Sky Hopinka.

SHORT FILM PROGRAMS

Wavelengths 1: Appetite for Destruction

As pessimistic prognoses flood in during our age of decline, dictatorships and devastation, this sweeping appetite for destruction also
fuels rebellious — even mischievous — forms of resistance and necessary counter-investigation.

Onward Lossless Follows Michael Robinson, USA
some cities Francesco Gagliardi, Canada
The Watchmen Fern Silva, USA
Wasteland No.1 – Ardent, Verdant Jodie Mack, USA
Phantasiesätze (Fantasy Sentences) Dane Komljen, Germany/Denmark
Dislocation Blues Sky Hopinka, Ho-Chunk Nation/USA

Wavelengths 2: Fluid Frontiers

A newly restored and astonishing short by film diarist Anne Charlotte Robertson launches this programme of portraits and homages,
with links to notions of home and heritage.

Pixillation Anne Charlotte Robertson, USA (Restoration courtesy of Harvard Film Archive)
Ticino Friedl vom Gröller, Austria/Italy
Brown And Clear Kevin Jerome Everson, USA
Turtles Are Always Home (Sokun Al Sulhufat) Rawane Nassif, Canada/Lebanon/Qatar
Configuration in Black and White Helga Fanderl, Germany
Fire Lucy Parker, United Kingdom
From Source to Poem Rosa Barba, Germany
Fluid Frontiers Ephraim Asili, USA/Canada

Wavelengths 3: Figures in the Landscape

There is much to manoeuvre in the world. When quotidian objects seemingly conspire against and constrict our movement, inevitably
slowing us down in an over-accelerated world, attendant shifts in meaning and interventions can propose unforeseen detours.

Mr. Yellow Sweatshirt Pacho Velez, Yoni Brook, USA
Yeti Wojciech Bąkowski, Poland
(100ft) Minjung Kim, South Korea/USA
Heart of a Mountain Parastoo Anoushahpour, Ryan Ferko, Faraz Anoushahpour, Taiwan/Canada
Rose Gold Sara Cwynar, USA
Division Movement to Vungtau Benjamin Crotty, Bertrand Dezoteux, France
Flores Jorge Jácome, Portugal

Wavelengths 4: As Above, So Below

Four exceedingly different films, each with its own documentary impulse, suggest rich interplay between metaphoric and physical
horizon lines and amid shifting scales: of thread, of light and shadow, of environmental elements, of existential contemplation and of
memory.

La Libertad Laura Huertas Millán, Colombia/France/USA
Palmerston Blvd. Dan Browne, Canada
below-above André Lehmann, Switzerland
Aliens Luis López Carrasco, Spain