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In 2021 Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto’s (LIFT) celebrated its 40th anniversary as an artist-run organization. Toronto has changed wildly over the past four decades and the desire to explore this ever shifting urban landscape led to the creation of “Transformations: A Cross Generational Commissioning Project.” 

Each pair was tasked with considering an open ended question: What defines a city in flux? These commissioned films are explorations of collective experience, and cultural memory; placemaking; intersectional storytelling; intergenerational exchange; and imagined or unexpected communities. 

LIFT Presents....

TRANSFORMATIONS: 
Short Films Exploring A City In Flux

Organized by:
Cayley James and Robert Lee



LIFT Presents:

TRANSFORMATIONS: 
Short Films Exploring A City In Flux

Written by: Cayley James and Helen Lee


When the Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto (LIFT) was first established by a small collective of filmmakers in 1981 the city of Toronto and the landscape of filmmaking were both vastly different than they are today. Conversations about affordability and gentrification have risen to the forefront of the city's consciousness; while digital filmmaking processes have ultimately usurped analogue in the commercial market. In light of these two forces, amongst others, the character and function of LIFT as an organization has changed as well. In acknowledgement and celebration of all that is new, as well as what has remained, we launched Transformations: A Cross-Generational Commissioning Project to invite the wider LIFT community to generate something new as a way to look back on our shared history as independent filmmakers in the ever-changing city of Toronto.

The Transformations commission was inspired by experimental filmmaker Barbara Hammer and Gina Carducci’s collaborative film Generations (2010). In the film, Hammer and Carducci take turns filming at the now-foreclosed Astroland amusement park on Coney Island and then blended their footage into a finished work. At the time Carducci was an aspiring filmmaker and Hammer was 70, well into a prolific career. Generations makes change and evolution its subject.  Not only in its location, but as well as to the notion of transformation as a passage of knowledge from one generation of filmmaker to another. It was this intergenerational dialogue which acted as the guiding tenet of our commissioning project. 
 

When the Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto (LIFT) was first established by a small collective of filmmakers in 1981 the city of Toronto and the landscape of filmmaking were both vastly different than they are today.

Still from meditations on a process, Kourtney Jackson and Edie Steiner, 2023, 00:12;28, LIFT

 

In the Summer of 2022, we opened the call for applications by posing the question: “What defines a city in flux?” as a prompt for emerging filmmakers to join up with veteran filmmakers and create a film in response to. These five filmmakers each held their own history with LIFT. In some cases dating back to the early 1980s. Helen Lee, Jorge Manzano, Kelly O’Brien, John Price and Edie Steiner, alongside younger filmmakers, Dev Ramsawakh, Luísa Cruz, Alice Charlie Liu, Jean-Pierre (JP) Marchant and Kourtney Jackson, responded to the prompt with curiosity and ingenuity, traversing numerous genres and themes. 

In this program we find experimental documentaries, futuristic narratives, diary films, portraits and expanded cinema performances. Together, they testify to the breadth of knowledge and talent in the independent filmmaking community, and to the value of dialogue in service of reflection. 

- Written by Cayley James and Helen Lee

* Due to unforeseen circumstances Alice Charlie Liu was unable to be part of Transformations. Her project is forthcoming. 

 

In this program we find experimental documentaries, futuristic narratives, diary films, portraits and expanded cinema performances.

Still from What We Carry, Dev Ramsawakh and Helen Lee, 2023, 00:06:26, LIFT
 


ABOUT THE ARTISTS

LUISA CRUZ

Luisa Cruz is a Brazilian filmmaker and producer based in Toronto. She likes to think of her practice as a process, often wondering about the act of image making in itself, both personally and collectively. Themes of longing and belonging are intertwined in her personal practice. As a producer, she has worked on experimental narratives, music videos and commercials. Luísa has a BFA in Film Production from York University. 
ARTIST WEBSITE
PROFILE ON VUCAVU

JORGE MANZANO

Jorge Manzano was born in Santiago de Chile in 1968 and immigrated with his family to Canada following the military coup of 1973. In 1994, Jorge formed Nepantla Films. Nepantla is a Nahuatl word that describes the reality of living between various worlds and identities. His award winning films include “City of Dreams” and “Johnny Greyeyes” screened at the Sundance Film Festival and his screenplay, “The Strike,” was a quarter finalist for the Academy Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting, shortlisted for the Sundance Film Festival screenwriting lab, the Tribecca Institutes All Access Program, and won the TIFF-CBC Diverse Screenwriters Grant.
JORGE MANZANO IMBD
PROFILE ON VUCAVU

DEV RAMSAWAKH

Dev Ramsawakh is an award-winning disabled, transmasculine and diasporic Indo-Caribbean storyteller and educator whose work focuses on community, arts and decolonization. They often refer to themselves as a “living archive.” Dev’s short films have been screened at film festivals and their writing has been in the likes of VICE, The Toronto Star, Chatelaine, CBC and Xtra. Dev produces Radio LUMI for Luminato Festival Toronto and has worked as a consultant for various institutions. Dev’s practice has been supported by the Ontario Arts Council, LIFT, Tangled Art+Disability, and SKETCH Working Arts. They also facilitate workshops independently and with CRIP Collective around disability justice, media, storytelling, and more.
ARTIST WEBSITE
PROFILE ON VUCAVU

HELEN LEE

Helen Lee is a Seoul-born, Toronto-based filmmaker whose works explore intersectionalities of place, identity and sexuality. She works in fiction and essay films, featuring diasporic gendered subjects from feminist and transnational perspectives. Upcoming films include “Paris to Pyongyang” and “A Little Tenderness” (working title), a coming-of-age drama set on the day of the Sewol Ferry disaster.
ARTIST WEBSITE
PROFILE ON VUCAVU

KOURTNEY JACKSON

Kourtney Jackson is a Toronto-based writer and filmmaker interested in hybridized, experimental forms of storytelling that exist within and transcend the physical body. Centered in the socio-cultural collisions of subjectivity, surveillance, and societal prescriptions of identity, her films “1 versus 1” (2018) and “Wash Day” (2020) have screened locally and internationally at festivals including TIFF Next Wave, BlackStar Film Festival, Sundance Film Festival (Ignite x Adobe), Breakthroughs Film Festival, and Columbus Black International Film Festival. Through film and other lens-based media, Kourtney continues to explore narratives that exist within the demarcations of mind, body, and spirit. 
ARTIST WEBSITE
PROFILE ON VUCAVU

EDIE STEINER


Edie Steiner is an independent artist whose work is exhibited in international arts venues and published in cultural texts. Her projects cross genres and her films have been broadcast on Canadian public television and won international awards. Her early documentary photographs are in the National Gallery of Canada’s permanent collection. She was a member of the 1980s experimental film collective, The Funnel, and later served on the LIFT Board. She holds a PhD in environmental studies and has taught arts-based practices in Canadian and international educational institutions and projects. Recent work includes a feature documentary, Borderland Memories (2020), funded by the Canada Council for the Arts, and an experimental poetry film temporal assemblages (2022). She is currently working on a series of new poetry films.
ARTIST WEBSITE
PROFILE ON VUCAVU

KELLY O'BRIEN

Kelly O'Brien is a mother and independent filmmaker living in Toronto.
Her short diary films have screened internationally and online for NY Times Op-Docs. Her live documentary performance/family slideshow, “Postings From Home,” based on a decade’s worth of Facebook posts, has been featured at documentary festivals throughout Canada, including the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival in 2018. She’s currently adapting it into a feature film. She received an MFA in film production at York University and is now, very slowly, pursuing a PhD in Environmental Studies at York University.  
PROFILE ON VUCAVU

ALICE CHARLIE LIU 

Alice Charlie Liu is a photographer and director based between Toronto and NYC. She is an alum of TIFF Next Wave and Telluride Film Festival's Student Symposium and a 2019 Tribeca Film Institute Film Fellow. Her film “Fictions” (2021) is currently on the festival circuit and won the National Film Board of Canada Award for Best Canadian Film at Toronto Reel Asian Film Festival and has received the support of the Canada Council for the Arts. 
ARTIST WEBSITE
PROFILE ON VUCAVU

JEAN-PIERRE (JP) MARCHANT

Jean-Pierre (JP) Marchant is a filmmaker and graduate of the York MFA program in Film and Media Studies. He is currently the Director of Operations for Cinemobilia, a mobile media digitisation lab at York. He is also a freelance video editor and colourist and teaches film classes at universities and other institutions. His shorts have screened and won awards in several festivals and art galleries including Photophobia, Trinity Square Video, the Festival of (In)Appropriation, the Calgary International Film Festival, WNDX, Antimatter [Media Art], and many more. 
ARTIST WEBSITE
PROFILE ON VUCAVU

JOHN PRICE

John Price is an independent filmmaker, photographer, diarist, and educator born in Fleming, New Jersey in 1967. He has lived in Canada since 1969. Price’s work features extensive experimentation with a wide range of motion picture film emulsions and camera formats. Primarily interested in humanist documentary films with a social conscience, his personal work is a celluloid diary of everyday life. He has produced 50+ films since 1986, which have been exhibited at numerous festivals, museums, and galleries internationally, including New York Film Festival, Berkeley Museum of Art and Pacific Film Archive, Museum of Modern Art Buenos Aires, International Film Festival Rotterdam and Berlinale. 
ARTIST WEBSITE
PROFILE ON VUCAVU
 

ABOUT LIFT:


The Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto (LIFT) is an artist-run charitable organization dedicated to facilitating excellence in the moving image through media arts education and production resources.

LIFT exists to provide support and encouragement for independent filmmakers and artists through affordable access to production, post-production and exhibition equipment; professional and creative development; workshops and courses; commissioning and exhibitions; artist residencies; and a variety of other services. Founded in 1981 by a small collective, LIFT has since grown to become one of the foremost centres of its kind globally. 


FIND OUT MORE HERE

LIFT acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for support of this project.



This program is presented Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto (LIFT) in partnership with VUCAVU.

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