I spent a week this past July hanging out in Durham, Ontario with the experimental filmmakers attending senior Canadian artist Phil Hoffmann’s legendary Film Farm. These avant-gardists are often called “fringe” filmmakers and, having spent my youth playing “fringe music” in the Toronto free improv scene, I have a soft spot for creative endeavors that emphasize process and the materiality of the medium. However, when it comes time to assess the results, the product is all that’s left and coherence or some sense of direction is the bottom line. I rely on my gut and intuition in evaluating this work, but leave myself open to possibilities rather than get hung up on expectations. Given the speculative nature of these experiments, it’s better to come at them as a dream analyst rather than a scorekeeper. 
Cynthia Madansky, Tarlabasi, 2014, HD
Some of the best films in the fringe-y Wavelengths program at the otherwise pretty straightforward Toronto International Film Festival are not unlike dreams. A certain percentage of the works in this program skew to a more formal bent, but those that draw from a slightly older tradition rooted in surrealism provide more in the way of potential substance. Though, like the roommate who recounts her dreams every morning at breakfast, the results can be hit or miss. Cynthia Madansky’s scenes of dancers moving in a mildly alienated fashion through the rubble-strewn streets of Istanbul show the right amount of restraint (whereas the distracting plink plonk soundtrack does not). The legends of witches coupled to washed out landscapes on the island of Lanzarote make for a night of sublime dread in Samuel M. Delgado and Helena Girón’s Neither God Nor Santa Maria. And Calum Walter’s Terrestrial cycles through subways, airports and clouds like a sleepwalker mapping sites of transition and movement. 
Isiah Medina, 88:88, 2015
The magnum opus of these filmic reveries is Canadian Isiah Medina’s feature length 88:88. It flickers through visuals and voiceover with the frenetic pace of a fever dream, all overlapping images of urban youth and unlikely shifts in setting but with such forward motion it demands attention. It’s also draining, paced like a Ryan Trecartin production but without the computer graphics and millennial logorrhea. My advice is to go with the flow and enjoy the ride.
Contributions from citizens of the contemporary art world include Mark Lewis’s compilation of city portraits, some of which people will recognize from his recent installations. An hour and a half of said slow pans demands a lot of a sitting audience, so I’m not sure whose interest this serves but it sure looks epic and contemplative. Tony Romano and Corin Sworn contribute a feature that I haven’t seen, but it will be screened for free at Clint Roensich Gallery for the rest of the week. Other than that there are slim pickings for art installations since Future Projections, the separate program for such work, has now been collapsed into Wavelengths, but if you’re interested there’s a Guy Maddin project and something from Apichatpong Weerasthakul out there for you to discover without having to line up.
Wavelengths: http://tiff.net/festivals/festival15/films#wavelengths
The Toronto International Film Festival continues until September 20.
Terence Dick is a freelance writer living in Toronto. His art criticism has appeared in Canadian Art, BorderCrossings, Prefix Photo, Camera Austria, Fuse, Mix, C Magazine, Azure, and The Globe and Mail. He is the editor of Akimblog. You can follow his quickie reviews and art news announcements on Twitter @TerenceDick.
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Wavelengths at the Toronto International Film Festival
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