Prepare to be amazed!

For over three decades, in his daring short films and installation pieces, as well as in his impressive production design work for Atom Egoyan and others, Phillip Barker has made an indelible mark on Canadian moving image-making.

“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

The CFI is honoured to present this Café Ex retrospective of Phillip Barker’s incredible short films.

Phillip Barker will attend the screening to introduce and discuss his work. At this event there will also be a book launch of the new publication about Barker’s work, Strange Machines: the films of Phillip Barker (2018, edited by Mike Hoolboom).

Presented in collaboration with SAW Video, The Knot, and the Independent Filmmakers Co-operative of Ottawa (IFCO).

Admission is pay as you can.