We visited our friends to the north this April and screened Your Day is My Night at the 26th Images Festival in Toronto. Images has been a terrific showcase for the expansion of cinematic form since 1988 and in our humble opinion, one of the coolest festivals around. Offering 10+ days of screenings and installations, there’s so much to see from artists and filmmakers around the world. Lynne participated in a talk moderated by programmer Elwood Jimmy and joined by filmmaker Adele Horne, entitled “Fresh Lenses on the Domestic Sphere”. Discussion focused on both Your Day is My Night and Adele’s film Maintenance since both filmmakers were exploring their subjects’ relationship to home through distinctive visual techniques. As cinematographer, Sean had a lot to say as well, in terms of how we shot both film and video in such tiny spaces, how we used hand gestures to create movement on screen and how we activated our performers as they delivered their monologues.
While Images reached out to the city at large via an article in the Toronto Star that featured our film, the Reel Asian Film Festival did a fantastic job of publicizing to the local Chinese community with a piece in the Ming Pao Chinese Newspaper. According to Lynne, “One of the highlights of my five days in Toronto was hearing from Reel Asian’s Chris Chin after our screening. He told me how much he liked watching the older Chinese performers sitting around the kitchen table shelling peanuts, just the way Chinese people did generations ago in China. He explained to me that the Cantonese word for shelling peanuts also means ‘gossiping.’ Now that is one beautiful image.”
We found Toronto itself to be a real cine-city. According to local lore, there is a distinct film festival every two weeks! We visited the Liason of Independent Filmmakers Toronto (LIFT) to see their incredible facilities, met friendly gallery owners, and hung out into the night at CineCycle, a combination art space, bike repair shop, and micro cinema (formerly a turn of the century horse stable).