F-O-R-M’s Commissioning Fund is an exciting program offered by the festival for youth and emerging artists. This year, we are delighted to have commissioned five new movement films from artists across Canada between the ages of 22-30. Each artist received $2000, a membership and equipment credit to Cineworks in Vancouver and Charles St. Video in Toronto. Artists also had access to mentors Nancy Lee, Sammy Chien and Sophia Wolfe to support their process’ along the way. These resources all went towards the creation of brand new movement films which will be premiered during this screening! 

This years artists worked towards complex ideas that involve seeing movement through animation, costumes, private spaces and travels. Each film carries a personal story speaking to issues of identity, belonging and memory.

We are thrilled to present these new films to you. Thank you and congratulations to all the artists involved, and for being a part of our fourth F-O-R-M Commissioning Fund Program.

Please join us after the screening for a talk back with the artists facilitated by Jen Sungshine. 

Rated PG - Nudity

Run-of-the-Whip-Poor-Will

Tamar Tabori | Toronto

Routines, patterns, and cycles are a part of human behaviour. By breaking a habit and practicing the opposite, we are challenging what is normal. We are constantly evolving and moulding ourselves to new contexts and environments this is how we, as humans, find ordinary. We carry forth what we know into our unknowns, creating adaptations and new norms. We move around and travel to see, hear, smell, taste, and feel a number of things on the quest to satisfy our never-ending curiosities. Our intrigue is followed by the need to understand. We experience shock and amazement that, once they subside, are followed by a desire to render the mysterious familiar. More often than not, this mystery quickly becomes normal, and has always been normal to those who knew it before. Questioning the typical is a way of inquiring about the strange. The more you sit and think about it, the more the normal becomes bizarre. If “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure,” then one man’s ordinary is another man’s extraordinary.

Ho.Me

Carolina Bergonzoni, All Bodies Dance Project | Vancouver

Ho.Me is a short dance film that explores the themes of belonging, comfort, and discomfort in relation to the notion of inhabiting the body. The piece is comprised of three portraits of individuals who live in very different bodies linked together through a loose narrative. Shot in the intimate settings of each dancers’ home, the three performers move through solo material derived from the questions: Where do I come from? What stories do I carry? What is inside me? Through the movement of each character, we learn about their distinct qualities and quirks. The audience will be invited into the intimacy of the dancer's homes: a kitchen, a living room, a couch, a clock... What stories do these places carry? How does the body relate to them?
Gradually, the dancers come together in a shared environment that is impersonal and removed from their private spaces. How do our own personal stories merge to become an ensemble? Ho.Me revels in the beauty of difference, and the universality of the body.

Trace, Tread

Jenna Mazur | Vancouver

An otherwise typical day in the studio is shifted when a dancer’s notes animate into geometric objects. The magic that exists in the mundanities of the everyday is made physical as the dancer stirs the room with her energy and ideas. Memories of movement hang in the air until the momentum of ideas are exhausted.

SEE QUINN RUN

Jordan Campbell and Tyler Sloane | Toronto

We love to party. We love sequins. We love fashion, dance and music. Why?
We present to you a glamorous romp through Toronto alterna-queer nightlife, one sequin at a time. The looks, the mess, the drama.
Follow Quinn on his search for a day off. RUN!

soft teeth

Zahra Shahab | Vancouver

soft teeth is an experimental video about mutant creatures that undergo several processes of metamorphosis. It is a playful illustration of metaphysical queer identity in its indefinability and perpetual state of emergence. The creatures morph and merge, birthing new versions of themselves while finding synthesis with their physical landscape. Their soft bodies become a terrain of potential, with body parts growing, shrinking, relocating, and being replaced with images from other worlds. An emphasis on the fantastical allows room for the entities to not rely on a stable future or a concrete narrative, but instead exist in a continually amorphous, unpredictable state.