The 36th Images Festival Starts Today

So to Speak, Light, Wonwoo Kim. Digital video, 2022. (Video still courtesy of the artist).

Welcome to the 2023 Images Festival! Running from April 13-26, the festival showcases an exciting selection of films, videos, performances, workshops, and exhibitions created by both established and emerging artists, filmmakers, and creative practitioners from Toronto and various parts of the globe.

Tonight is the preshow— starting at 6:30 PM at the TIFF Bell Lightbox for A Woman Escapes, a collaborative feature carefully crafted from video letters exchanged over the span of successive lockdowns during the pandemic between filmmakers Sofia Bohdanowicz, Blake Williams and Burak Çevik. Presented in partnership with TIFF Wavelengths.

The festival officially opens tomorrow, Thursday, April 13, at 5:30 pm with a reception at The Commons at 401 Richmond Street West. Come and celebrate the festival with local and international artists, curators, creatives, and community members over food and drinks! After the reception, the World Premiere of the feature So To Speak, Light by Wonwoo Kim will take place at Innis Town Hall at 8 PM, followed by a conversation with Kim and Images Programming Director Jaclyn Quaresma.

The opening day also includes the launch of two exhibitions. In partnership with VTape, the multimedia exhibition The Density of Dust, featuring naakita feldman-kiss and curated by Lisa Steel at the Bachir/Yerex Presentation Space presents a video installation using material collection and close listening to explore a centuries-old industrial building’s history and its surroundings. Secondly, bringing to light what came from inside curated by Samay Arcentales opens at Charles Street Video, and is a response to a long-time partnership between Images Festival and Charles Street Video and its thematic residencies. In particular, a 2001 residency named Lo-Fi Sci-Fi tipped CSV on its head and filled its editing rooms with imaginative, probing artists.

Please visit the Images Festival website at www.imagesfestival.com for the full program lineup and to purchase tickets. Please keep in mind that only 20% of tickets will be available at the door. Don’t forget to subscribe to our newsletter to receive updates about upcoming events and programming here.

For media-specific inquiries, please contact Claudia Arana at: press@imagesfestival.com.

ACCESSIBILITY

Images Festival is committed to providing an accessible festival and continues to work to reduce barriers to participation in our events. In this ongoing effort to make Images more accessible to our community, all exhibitions and online and in-person screenings are Pay What You Can. Concurrently, the following services will be implemented for selected events this year: closed captioning, creative audio description, and ASL interpretation. In addition, all of our digital publications are formatted for assistive reading technologies.

ABOUT IMAGES FESTIVAL

Images Festival is a platform for the exhibition and discourse of independent film and media art. Created in 1987, Images has spent the last 36 years presenting media works that are challenging in their form and content. Images showcases the intersection of emerging and established practices and invites open critical dialogue in the film and media arts community around the political herstories of moving image production, distribution, exhibition, and representation.

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