Home and Away. Commissions and Resident Films from the LIFT

45 7 Broadway, Tomonari Nishikawa

The Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto (LIFT) celebrates 35 years this year as one of the leading nonprofit film production access centres internationally. Formed as a cooperative in the early 1980s to support local Toronto filmmakers towards the development of a strong independent film scene, it has expanded over the years to provide access for filmmakers to a diverse range of equipment, workshops and production support. While always supportive of narrative, experimental and documentary film, LIFT originally distinguished itself from two local video co-coops by primarily supporting works made on film. Over the past ten years, LIFT has wisely embraced digital technology as both a primary means of production and as a hybrid workflow support that continues to make celluloid filmmaking possible. LIFT continued to support celluloid filmmaking at the same time as it was investing in new digital tools. This passion of the analogue has made it well equipped to support the rebound of celluloid filmmaking that has happened in the last decade.

The program that I am presenting at S8 in June is just a small fragment of the films that have come out of LIFT’s commissioning stream, its mentorship programs and an ever-growing visiting artist in residence program. Many other films could have been selected in their place, to say nothing of the fact that our members produce roughly 1000 projects a year in all forms. However, these films do demonstrate a range of the possibilities of analogue filmmaking that is available at LIFT, with an emphasis on experimental practice.

Towards a Vanishing Point, Chris Kennedy

I have been a member of LIFT since 1999, long before I joined the staff in 2013, and have made many films with their facilities. Towards a Vanishing Point, which was included at the request of the organizers of S8, was one of 30 films by 30 filmmakers commissioned to celebrate LIFT’s 30th Anniversary in 2011. The sole requirement of the commission was that part of the film had to originate on Super 8. Three other films from that commission are included in the program. Local Super 8 filmmaker, John Porter, who has made over 300 films since 1968, turned the commission into a literal residency for his film Light Sleeper by sleeping in LIFT’s classroom for 10 hours and recording it with time lapse on four different cameras (the version showing at S8 is his favourite angle). JP Kelly’s A Minimal Difference found him working on our rostrum camera to do a Super 8 animation. By allowing Kelly to work in film, this project became the start of a new direction in his moving image work—one that incorporates his interest in Oskar Fischinger’s visual music and both political and visual abstraction. Larissa Fan’s the tide goes in, the tide goes out was made with LIFT’s JK optical printer and hand processed in the darkroom down the hall—Fan traced a literal back and forth movement through LIFT’s facilities that follows a well-used path by many of our filmmakers who indulge in the analogue arts.

A Minimal Difference, Jean Paul Kelly

For a dozen years, LIFT has been working in collaboration with the ImagineNative Film + Media Arts Festival with a mentorship that supports an emerging Indigenous filmmaker through the process of making a film—shooting on 16mm and transferring to digital. The films have ranged from animation to narrative to experimental work and have all consequently found a strong life on the festival circuit, likely due to a growing international interest in indigenous media-making. Tyler Hagan’s Estuary, shown in part in homage to the Ría da Coruña takes place on the Fraser River, the longest river on Canada’s west coast. The film is a lovely way into his interest in the multiple histories behind landscape—environmental, indigenous and contemporary—and speaks to a strong visual language that traces its way through his art practice.

East Meets West, Dirk de Bruyn

Our international residency program has been going strong for over fifteen years and has supported dozens of artists over the years. This selection of five films just scratches the surface (Two other S8 participants this year—Nicky Hamlyn and Martha Colburn have also been LIFT residents). Sami van Ingen was one of the first visiting artists, building on a long time collaboration with another Toronto filmmaker, Phil Hoffman. Van Ingen’s The Sequent of Hanna Avenue (2006). was an early (for LIFT) exploration of the possibilities of digital and analogue hybridity, with van Ingen scanning the source film to digital and the outputting back to 35mm film—a process that has become much more frequent in the years that followed. Many filmmakers use their time to explore a variety of processes that don’t necessarily end in a finished film and Tomonari Nishikawa used his 2011 residency to that effect. 45 7 Broadway (2013), while not technically made at LIFT, was an outgrowth of the numerous experiments Nishikawa brought to our facilities during his stay—in this case the beautiful possibilities of three-colour separation. Dirk de Bruyn also came to LIFT with numerous projects—drawn from a working archive of over forty years—and used many of our facilities to bring the work into shape—the lovely East Meets West (2014) features one of LIFT’s most treasured machines, our Oxberry 1700 Optical Printer, which has served many local and visiting filmmakers well over the last ten years (and was most recently used by filmmaker John Price to produce a brand new print of Sea Series # 14, # 19, # 20 especially for this festival). Kevin Jerome Everson’s Chevelle continues Everson’s focus on the relationship between the auto industry and African American culture, this time meeting at an end point—the eponymous GM car of the title is crushed into a new sculptural form at a junkyard a few miles up the 400 highway from Toronto. Kerstin Schroedinger’s Fugue (2015) is the most recent films to be completed at LIFT by a visiting artist, and served as an exciting technical challenge for both the artist and LIFT’s tech department—figuring out how to motion capture the movement of light and then translate that movement into a soundtrack. The brainstorming and testing that occurred at LIFT and the behind the scenes digital/analogue hybridity of the project resulted in a spectacular film, one that I think speaks to injection of creativity that working with local and international artists brings to our organization on an almost daily basis.
Chris Kennedy

Chevelle, Kevin Jerome Everson