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Knot Project Space is excited to have hosted its third volume of the Common Cinema initiative, the first of which took place in November 2018. Over the span of one week, the Common Cinema played host to a series of partner organisations who presented theatrical-style screenings in a temporary micro-cinema context, and at times facilitated group discussions following the work. For this third volume, which took place from February 26th – February 28th, three consecutive evening screenings and events were presented in partnership with Transgender Media Portal, the Winnipeg Film Group, and the Canadian Film Institute, respectively. These screenings featured local, national, and international content, explored a range of approaches to the moving image, and addressed urgent contemporary concerns.
Major! – Annalise Orphelian (93min) [screening + discussion]
Presented in partnership with Transgender Media Portal
Info
The Transgender Media Portal Project is a SSHRC-funded project operating through Carleton University that endeavours to create a collaborative online database of trans, Two Spirit, nonbinary, intersex, and gender-nonconforming filmmakers and their works. This screening serves as an opportunity to enjoy a sample of those works and to interact with others who share an interest in trans cinema.
Synopsis
Miss Major is a veteran of the Stonewall Rebellion and a survivor of Attica State Prison, a former sex worker, an elder, and a community leader and human rights activist. She is simply “Mama” to many in her community. Her personal story and activism for transgender civil rights intersects LGBT struggles for justice and equality from the 1960s to today. At the center of her activism is her fierce advocacy for her girls, trans women of colour who have survived police brutality and incarceration in men’s jails and prisons. https://www.missmajorfilm.com/
Found in Translation: (Being) Women in Canada [screening]
Jessie Short, Danielle Sturk, Tricia Wasney, Shanwa Dempsey + Tracey Traeger, Erica Eyres, Eve Majzels, Michelle Elrick, Caroline Monnet, Amanda Strong, Leslie Supnet and Rhayne Vermette
Presented in partnership with Winnipeg Film Group and Canadian Film Institute
Info
The Winnipeg Film Group’s Distribution Department has hundreds of amazing (funny, poignant, thoughtful, quirky) short films in their collection and they wanted to share them with a broader audience. Some of these uniquely Canadian stories were largely inaccessible to French audiences here in Canada and around the world. With a grant from the Canada Council for the Arts, WFG were able to translate and subtitle over 30 titles.
About the (Being) Women in Canada program
“This program recognises and celebrates films from Winnipeg Film Group’s history that are directed by women. While all the programs curated in the Found in Translation project feature works by women, the films in this program in particular comment on gender or the experience of being a woman in Canada, a traditionally patriarchal western country. That commentary is made either explicitly or implicitly, individually or collectively through the dialogue created between them.” -Stephanie Berrington
CAFÉ EX: Phillip Barker [screening + discussion]
Presented in partnership with Canadian Film Institute and IFCO
Info
Inaugurated in 1998, the twenty-first season of the ongoing visiting artist series CAFÉ EX presents artist-curated evenings of independent experimental film and video in the Knot Project Space in Arts Court. Once again, the series features Canadian experimental cinema, with guest filmmakers presenting their work and engaging in extensive discussions.
About the program
“Impeccably crafted, blurring the lines between experimental, documentary, and dramatic modes, Barker’s films incorporate contemporary fairy tales, occasional Steampunk fabulism, and the abstract, angular movement vocabularies of contemporary dance. Not unlike the pioneering cinematic conjurations of Georges Méliès, bursting forth with optical tricks suffused with a simultaneously playful and sinister sense that cinema is a form of quasi-magical practice, the films of Phillip Barker recalibrate our ways of seeing moving images while we are in the process of watching them.”
-Tom McSorley, Canadian Film Institute
67 Nicholas St, Ottawa, ON K1N 7B9