Café Ex
2022 - 2023 Season
After an almost three-year interruption, the Canadian Film Institute guest artist experimental cinema series, Café Ex, finally returns to in-person screenings at Club SAW. Since the series started in 1998, Café Ex has presented 67 different Canadian moving image artists at its 77 shows over 23 seasons of screenings, artist talks, book launches, and interactive cinema experiences – not to mention all that amazing socializing with Canada’s top experimental moving image artists.
For our 24th season, we are thrilled to have acclaimed moving image artists Madi Piller (Toronto), Phil Rose (Ottawa), and Alexandra Gelis (Toronto-Bogotá) come to Club SAW to present and discuss their remarkable works.
We look forward to seeing you again in person at Club SAW, and we thank you for supporting this these Canadian artists and this series for over two decades!
Tom McSorley
Executive Director
Canadian Film Institute
Madi Piller
November 9, 2022
Phil Rose
April 26, 2023
Alexandra Gelis
June 7, 2023
Alexandra Gelis
June 7, 2023 • 7:00 pm • Club SAW, 67 Nicholas St., Ottawa
Our third and final presentation in the 24th season of Café Ex is a presentation of the impressive, inventive, and searching work of Alexandra Gelis. Based in Toronto, Gelis is a Colombian-Venezuelan artist living between Canada, Panama, and Colombia. Her unique moving image practice is research-based, process-oriented, and multi-disciplinary. It incorporates film, photography, drawing, and multimedia. Exploring ideas of memory, identity, corporeality, history, and time itself, Gelis’s moving image works are at once tender and tough-minded, startling and confrontational, poetic and political.
Alexandra Gelis will attend the screening to introduce and discuss her work.
The Canadian Film Institute is honoured to have Alexandra Gelis as a Café Ex guest artist.
The Canadian Film Institute is partnering with the Lightproof Film Collective’s Encounters Series to offer additional artist talks with Canada’s best experimental moving image artists.
An artist talk with Alexandra Gelis will take place Thursday, June 8th at 2pm at IFCO.
Previous Events
There and Back To See How Far It Is: Moving Image Works 1998-2018 of
Philip Rose
April 26, 2023 • 7:00 pm • Club SAW, 67 Nicholas St., Ottawa
Our second presentation in the 24th season of Café Ex is a showcase of the daring and diverse moving images of Ottawa’s own extraordinary film artist, Philip Rose, entitled ‘There and Back To See How Far It Is: Moving Image Works 1998-2018.’
Rose will attend the screening to introduce and discuss his work. He will present a varied program of two decades of artistic production that incorporates his moving image explorations of time, landscape, and identity in celluloid and digital media forms, as well as screening samples of his mesmerizing, immersive video installation pieces.
The Canadian Film Institute is honoured to have Philip Rose as a Café Ex guest artist.
Plus, the Canadian Film Institute is partnering with the Lightproof Film Collective’s Encounters Series to offer additional artist talks with Canada’s best experimental moving image artists.
Moving To Stillness: An artist talk with Philip Rose
April 29, 2023 • 2:00 pm - 3:30pm • IFCO, Room A246, Arts Court, 2 Daly Avenue
Following upon his Cafe Ex screening on April 26th, Ottawa media artist/photographer Phil Rose will share additional insight on his lengthy practice on Saturday afternoon, April 29. Making a guest appearance will be one of his colour field light boxes created in the late 90’s.
Admission for this event is free.
Presented by Lightproof Film Collective's Film Encounters series in partnership with the Canadian Film Institute’s Café Ex.
Funded by the City of Ottawa
Cinematic Syncretism: The Moving Images of Madi Piller
November 9, 2022 • 7:30 pm • Club SAW, 67 Nicholas St., Ottawa
Peruvian-born Toronto-based experimental moving image creator Madi Piller is one of Canada’s most aesthetically inventive, philosophically searching, and stylistically protean film artists. Working in various celluloid (Super 8, 16mm, and 35mm) and digital formats, Piller’s remarkable career includes everything from animated films to installation work, from nonrepresentative poetic experimental films to quasi-documentary digital explorations to everything in between! In fact, Piller’s impressively varied career also includes having worked in the world of advertising and music videos (even shooting one for pop sensation Shakira). In addition to all of the above, Piller is also an independent moving image arts programmer and curator.
In Piller’s five Café Ex selections, striking cinematic combinations of media offer daring explorations of memory, identity (individual and familial), exile, longing and desire, and the powerful, insistent literal and metaphorical presence of landscape, whether in Peru or here in Canada. As you will see, from these combinations of image-making techniques and technologies come distinctive new ways of perceiving and expressing the worlds we inhabit and experience.
Piller’s works have been screened at film festivals and cultural spaces around the world, including TIFF Wavelengths; the Festival du Cinema Jeune, Paris, France; Bienal de La Imagen Movimiento, Buenos Aires, Argentina; and the Melbourne Animation Festival, Australia. Madi Piller has also screened her work at, and is a valued committed supporter of, our very own Ottawa International Animation Festival.
After two and half years away from our home at Club SAW, we are so happy and so honoured to present, as the first guest artist in the 24th season of Café Ex, the versatile, talented, passionate moving image creator Madi Piller.
Pre-ordered tickets are not required and there is no reserved seating. You can also pay-what-you-can (cash or card) at the door.