The 27th annual edition of Toronto’s famed Images Festival kicks off on April 10 with ten days celebrating the best of experimental film & video and contemporary moving image art. 
In addition to our co-presentations bookending the festival, there are Asian and Asian diasporic artists throughout the festival.
Reel Asian is excited to co-present the opening night gala presentation of From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf, a project by the CAMP Collective (Shaina Anand & Ashok Sukumaran, India/UAE 2013). Shot over four years in a wide range of formats, the film is an intimate and unmediated look at the lives of merchant seamen from India, Pakistan, and southern Iran, filming themselves as they traverse the Arabian Sea from the Gulf of Kutch in Western India, to Pakistan, to the coast of Somalia and the Persian Gulf. The screening takes place at 7pm on Thursday, April 10, at The Royal. Buy tickets here.
On the festival’s last day, Reel Asian will copresent Slow Jamz and Animated Text, a programme of short work by Images’ 2014 Canadian Spotlight artist Jennifer Chan. The work includes eight videos by Chan, interspersed with four other works by artists that Chan found significant to her own practice. The screening takes place at 7pm on Saturday, April 19, at Jackman Hall. Buy tickets here. Chan will also be part of a free artist talk at 3pm on Wednesday, April 17, at the Urbanspace Gallery at 401 Richmond. She will be joined by Brett Kashmere and there will be pie. Delicious pie.
Other Asian artists in selection in the on-screen component include:
- Byron Chan‘s 1997 (Canada 2013), part of the A collection of drops programme, curated by veteran Reel Asian programming committee member Johnson Ngo (9pm on Friday, April 11)
- Vipin Vijay‘s Vishaparvam (Venomous Folds) (India 2013) & Barry Doupé and Yota Kobayashi‘s Shikisou (Canada/Japan 2013), both in the A Conjuring, A Slow Acting Poison programme (6:30pm on Saturday, April12)
- Ian Cheng‘s bbrraattss (USA 2013), in Remodeled Beyond Recognition (9pm on Saturday, April 12)
- Minha Park‘s A Story of Elusive Snow (USA 2013) represents CalArts in the Double Nature International Student Showcase (6:30pm on Monday, April 14 – PWYC)
- Inhan Cho‘s Delicious Songs (S Korea 2013) plays as part of the Another Country programme (7pm on Friday, April 18)
All on-screen presentations take place at Jackman Hall. Among the live presentations & hybrid performances, look out for Tokyo-based musician and performer Taku Unami:
- The Curse of Vacancy is a shadow play featuring music and improvised performance. It will be staged at the Artscape Youngplace at 9:30pm on Thursday, April 17.
- Unami also performs, with media artist Evan Calder Williams, the live soundtrack to Calder’s Violent X, a projection piece with performance. It will take place at Jackman Hall at 9:30pm on Friday, April 18.
Images’ famed off-screen component of gallery installations and exhibitions also features Asians in the mix:
- Our friends at SAVAC copresent Monitor Reruns, a retrospective of the last decade of their annual experimental shorts programme, Monitor. The exhibition runs March 28 – May 3 at A Space
- Working in and out of the archive, running April 10-26 at Gallery TPW, brings together artists working in India, Bangladesh, Canada, and the USA to explore the Pad.ma online platform, a digital archive focussed on material from South Asia
- Sharlene Bamboat, who has been a juror for Reel Asian as well as a programming and South Asian advisory committee member, teams up with fellow media artist Alexis Mitchell to form Bambitchell. Their interactive installation Silent Citizen will take over a space on the lower level of the Chinatown Centre Mall from April 12-26.
Finally, we are delighted that this year’s jurors at Images include Shai Hereida from Bangalore, the head of Experimenta, an international festival for experimental cinema in India; and Toronto’s own Heather Keung, who only a few months ago stepped down from Reel Asian after eight years as our artistic director. Follow @imagesfestival and #IF2014 on Twitter for the latest updates!