UNSTEADY LANDSCAPES:

40th Anniversary of the Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto

The Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto (LIFT) turned 40 in April 2021. In honour of this milestone we are looking back to some of the films that LIFT has supported over the years.

These 10 films span genres and practices that encompass the incredible diversity of singular visions that we have been lucky enough to have had a small role in bringing to life. The program brings together titles that were supported through our long running production and post-production grants for members, the Madvo Collection Commissioning Project , Film Access in partnership with Tangled Art + Disability, LIFT/imagineNATIVE mentorship program with imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival, Studio Immersion Residency in partnership with PIX Film as well as our year-round production support of members projects through equipment rentals.

Celebrate Toronto’s rich film culture with this collage of forms and practices. From hand-processed experimental film to hybrid documentary and feature narratives and everything in between. Here’s to 40 more years of supporting excellence in the moving image.

 

The Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto (LIFT) officially came into being in April of 1981. Inspired in part by efforts of collective networking such as what was done at the Atlantic Filmmakers Cooperative (AFCOOP) in Halifax, LIFT was founded by a group of artists who were interested in providing support to filmmakers in Toronto. After managing to grow from a rented office at the Harbourfront Centre to our current building on Dupont Street in the city’s west end, we were hoping our 40th year would be our biggest one yet.
 

Because celebrations of this particular milestone have proven to be somewhat muted amidst the third wave of COVID-19 here in Ontario, we wanted to take a step back and pull from the past to gather optimism for the future. This program enables us to recall the collaboration, creativity and tenacity that has marked our past forty years as an artist-run centre. While this program is not a comprehensive list of the work that has been made by the LIFT community, we wanted to use it to provide a sense of growth about where we might be heading.

Nine of the ten films collected here were directly supported by LIFT’s programming over the past few decades, either through a production grant, mentorship, residency, commission or community partnership. The one outlier in this is Shelley Niro’s Honey Moccasin, which received production support in the way thousands of others have over the years, through rental equipment and collaboration with fellow LIFT members. Produced in 1998, this landmark film incorporates video, bends genres, and challenges expectations around notions of authenticity, gender and the modern indigenous experience. Honey Moccasin shares a keen exploration of a landscape shifting underfoot and the will to persevere at all costs with the other films in this program.

 

In some cases, the shifting landscape is quite literally the text of the film. This takes form in the swirling overhead shot of Eva Kolcze’s Dust Cycles (2018) revealing an abandoned house, giving way to erosion, sliding down the sandy shoals of the Scarborough Bluffs. It also appears in Amanda Strong’s elegiac call to arms to save the bees and consider the human impact on the environment in Honey for Sale (2009). In other cases, it is more subtle, as in Rolla Tahir’s bittersweet Sira (2018), which explores her family’s immigration story across three countries from the perspective of her mother. Time and place become pliable in Josephine Massarella’s hands in her experimental masterpiece 165708 (2017), while Leslie Supnet’s The Peak Experience (2018) guides the viewer through the slipperiness of memory and manifestation. 

Regardless of what form their films take, each of them shows a way to grapple and navigate through the politics of modern life. These political landscapes include affirmations of one’s gender identity in Susan Justin’s animated short Cut (2008); the fight for labour rights in Loveleen Kaur’s and Mariam Zaidi’s Behind the Fare (2015); or the tension that exists in traversing the built landscape in Adam Roy Cohoon’s Super8 film, Welcome to Ataratiri (2017). Cultural memory and politics further converge in Sharlene Bamboat’s hybrid documentary Video Home System (2018), which unpacks how cinema and art survive in a bootleg economy under state censorship. 
 

LIFT has striven over the past forty years to promote Toronto’s rich film culture by creating space for a plurality of visions. Forged in the 1980s when the media arts community was torn between video and analogue practices and amid a climate of draconian censorship that tried to suffocate unorthodox media exhibition, LIFT persevered. Toronto can still be hostile to artists and the organizations that support them but these films are indicative of a hard-won creative landscape.

We look forward to forty more years of helping bring projects to life! 

- Essay written by Cayley James