Images Festival is excited to announce the full program schedule for its 32nd edition. Images Festival showcases artistic excellence in contemporary moving image culture through 14 gallery exhibitions, 73 on-screen works, and eight live performances happening throughout the Greater Toronto Area (GTA). The 2019 program features works that elaborate the textures of communities and embody alternative, discursive models of moving image presentation. The curated lineup calls attention to our histories, solidarities, and collaborations, providing vivid perspectives that further challenge and uproot the dialogue surrounding experimental media art.

Images festival from from April 11-18th 2019.

Images Festival’s OPENING NIGHT film on Thursday, April 11 will be the Canadian premiere of Software Garden, a music video album by Rory Pilgrim at The Royal Cinema. In contrast to a recent fascination with technology’s dystopian impact on public and private life, the film asks how we meet from both behind and beyond our screens. Software Garden is preceded by Marnie Ellen Hertzler’s, Hi I Need To Be Loved and Andrés Baron’s Printed Sunset.

On Thursday, April 18 the CLOSING NIGHT program titled Outer Worlds is curated by Janine Marchessault, featuring five new large-format digital film shorts in celebration of the 50th anniversary of the invention of IMAX. Taking place at the historic Cinesphere Theatre at Ontario Place, Outer Worlds include works by Oliver Husain, Lisa Jackson, Kelly Richardson, Michael Snow, and Leila Sujir.

This year’s CANADIAN ARTIST SPOTLIGHT is Vancouver-based filmmaker KC Wei whose work explores the liminal space of music, video and writing, with romance, euphoria and dissolution coursing throughout her narratives. Wei’s first film Murky Colours, draws from the made-for-Hollywood spy novel first written by her father, Menjin Wei, and applies a particular collage aesthetic to account for the work’s fragmented storylines and hybridized, cinematic genre. In calling to this agglomerate execution, Wei selected Hito Steryl’s In Free Fall to accompany the Spotlight Feature.

The Images Festival was established by the Northern Visions Collective to look closely at the dynamics of accessibility. Images began as Toronto’s only alternative to the Toronto International Film Festival, integrating film and video from its inception, and later expanding to include installations, performances and new media.

Learn more here