Café Ex

25th Anniversary (2023 - 2024) Season

The Canadian Film Institute’s long-running guest artist Canadian experimental cinema series, Café Ex, will have its milestone 25th season this year, starting at the end of November.

Since the series began in 1998, Café Ex has presented 70 different Canadian moving image artists at its 80 shows over 24 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 25th season, we are thrilled to have daring, acclaimed moving image artists Kurt Walker (Vancouver-Toronto), Parastoo Anoushahpour (Toronto), and, from Ottawa, Matthieu Hallé.

Of course, all three of these moving image artists will come to Club SAW to present and discuss their remarkable works in person.

We look forward to seeing you again in person at Club SAW, and we thank you for supporting these Canadian artists and this series for two and a half decades!

Tom McSorley
Executive Director
Canadian Film Institute

Program

"The question of distance, return, and crossing drives these works formally, politically, and most importantly emotionally. In Razan Al Salah’s Your Father was Born 100 Years Old, and So Was the Nakba ever changing Google Street View images of Haifa completes with a voice from a distance breaking up because of bad connection that never the less holds a memory of a lived experience in a place, now out of reach. In Basma Al Sharif’s We Began by Measuring Distance, a playful gesture proposes a way to measure longing and disconnection and in doing so sets the ground for a devastating political meditation on separation, war, and occupation."

- Parastoo Anoushahpour

Pictures of Departure
Parastoo Anoushahpour, Faraz Anoushahpour
Canada | 2018 | 12 minutes

“In winter of 1986 our mother writes in her diary: ‘To scratch the surface of a subject does not penetrate deep into the subject.’ Almost three decades later, Pictures of Departure takes this entry and sets off to explore the surfaces and the scratches that linger across generations.” Parastoo Anoushahpour, Faraz Anoushahpour

We Began by Measuring Distance
Basma Alsharif
Egypt | 2009 | 19 minutes

“Long still frames, text, language, and sound are weaved together to unfold the narrative of an anonymous group who fill their time by measuring distance. Innocent measurements transition into political ones, examining how image and sound communicate history. We Began by Measuring Distance explores an ultimate disenchantment with facts when the visual fails to communicate the tragic.” Video Data Bank, Chicago

Born in Kuwait to Palestinian parents, Basma Alsharif is a visual artist using moving and still images, sound, and language, to explore the anonymous individual in relation to political history and collective memory. She received an MFA from the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois, Chicago in 2007 and has exhibited her works internationally, including in such cities as New York, Berlin, Sharjah, São Paulo, Tokyo, Murcia, and Paris.

Your Father was Born 100 Years Old, and So Was the Nakba
Razan Alsalah
Canada, Palestine | 2017 | 7 minutes

“A Palestinian grandmother returns to her hometown Haifa through Google Streetview, today, the only way she can see Palestine. In this experimental short film, filmmaker Razan AlSalah channels glitch aesthetics and digital erasure in a subversion of the physical borders and checkpoints imposed by the Israeli occupation.” Cinemapolitica

Based in Tiotiake/Montreal, Razan AlSalah is a Palestinian filmmaker whose work is concerned with investigating material aesthetics of dis/appearance of places and people in the context of colonial image worlds. She is a 2021 Sundance Grantee, 2020 Arab Fund for Arts and Culture Grantee, and Sundance New Frontier Story Lab Fellow and Grantee, as well as the recipient of the Knight Foundation New Frontier Fellowship at Sundance, Latham Award for an Emerging Experimental Video Artist at Ann Arbor Film Festival, and Sunbird Award for Best Narrative Short at Cinema Days Palestine. Her work has shown widely at internationally in festivals and galleries.

The Time That Separates Us

Parastoo Anoushahpour
Canada, Jordan, Palestine | 2022 | 35 minutes

“Shot in Jordan and Palestine, The Time That Separates Us takes its inspiration from the Sodom and Gomorrah tale of Lot to examine questions of family, geography, and the fraught ownership of narratives.” Andréa Picard, TIFF Wavelengths 2022

2023-2024 Season: Past Events

Matthieu Hallé

June 5 ∙ 7 PM ∙ Club SAW

Pick-your-price tickets

Our second presentation of the 25th season of Café Ex will showcase the protean, fascinating work of Ottawa experimental moving image maker, Matthieu Hallé.

For over a decade, Hallé has been exploring the complex, often electrifying aesthetic effects of the intersections of cinematic language, interactive performance, and the materiality of film medium itself. His absorbing, immersive, occasionally haunting work includes film and video, as well as moving image creations for live performance in collaboration with other artists and musicians. Our Café Ex presentation, curated by Hallé, will incorporate all these aspects of his distinctive and decidedly exploratory cinematic practice.

Matthieu Hallé’s works have been presented across North America, including at CROSSROADS (San Francisco), Ann Arbor Film Festival, Particle + Wave Media Arts Festival (Calgary), the 8fest (Toronto), and The Mobile Museum of Art (Alabama). He was an artist in residence at LIFT and PIXFilm (Toronto) and the Knot Project Space (Ottawa). He has a Bachelor of Communication and Media Studies from Carleton University and is a member/co-founder of Ottawa’s Lightproof Film Collective.

The Canadian Film Institute honoured to have Matthieu Hallé as our guest artist in our 25th anniversary season of Café Ex.

Where is Here?
The Moving Images of Kurt Walker

November 29, 2023 • 7:00 pm • Club SAW, 67 Nicholas St., Ottawa

Vancouver native and now Toronto-based moving image artist Kurt Walker offers a compelling and inventive cinematic language that weaves together images drawn from multimedia, gaming, and other audio-visual sources. His arresting work chronicles the peculiar sense of community that those ubiquitous moving image technologies can generate. It also suggests that perhaps modernity itself resides in our accelerated times in that very multi-layered fusion of mediated spaces with actual ones.

Locating oneself and one’s community within such technological complexity is a fascinating creative challenge taken up by Walker formally and thematically in his unique, imaginative cinema. Indeed, in Walker’s dazzling, disorienting work about our technocentric reality can be found an utterly original, urgently relevant 21st-century cinematic re-configuration of Northrop Frye’s quintessential Canadian question: where is here?

As Michael Scoular of The Cinematheque in Vancouver writes, “…Walker first came to cinema by a path only possible in this second century of the medium. Experimenting within the spaces of massively multiplayer online games like World of Warcraft, he began making machinima (a portmanteau of machine and cinema): movies that take game worlds, with their polygonal architecture, props, and model actors, as ready-made film sets. Walker’s films are likewise acts of transformative recreation informed by the time spent there, behind cameras and within games, knowing both the physical world and the digital one are marked by similar forces of dissolution, yet that the gaps opened up by these shifts allow a small and nimble cinema to chart its own course.”

We are honoured to have Kurt Walker as the first guest artist in our 25th anniversary season of Café Ex.

Program