A Love Letter to Student Films 🎥
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A Love Letter to Student Films: The TMFF Retrospective
As the annual Toronto Metropolitan Film Festival swings into motion, three students turned archivists and curators reflect on the history of film production at Toronto Metropolitan University by looking back through the film program’s thesis archive.
by cynthia cepeda
Featuring films spanning from the late ‘70s until now, the TMFF Retrospective highlights over four decades of student filmmaking, honouring the unique perspectives and practices of graduates who had roamed the same Image Arts halls that Lucia Fella Pellegrino, Luke Donovan, and Kaiya Malik are graduating from themselves.
Both celebratory and elegiac in nature, the program deftly weaves sentimental 16mm prints with modern digital masterpieces, culminating in a delightful love letter to student filmmaking, past and present. The Retrospective will be followed by a Q&A with five of the featured filmmakers, including Canadian indie darling, Graham Foy.
Over a beer at Duffy’s Tavern, Luke, Kaiya, and Lucia reflect on their favourite films in the curation, others that sadly did not make the cut, and how curating has influenced their own perspectives on student filmmaking.
LD: Well, in the curation, I really love Eddy (1977), which is a film about a garbage man with developmental disabilities. He worked for free, he got paid in Mountain Dew [this is met by protests and confused looks from Kaiya and Lucia], and he was a really hard worker. The film is very verité, and highlights this special connection that Eddy has with the rest of the workers. This is what he likes to do.
LFP: Paradise Falls (2013) is a very fun film about this magical house, but it’s also one of the ones where I feel the changes in the Image Arts program the most. Like, there weren’t as many restrictions back then, some of the things featured are kind of crazy—things I will redact to maintain the element of surprise. I would like to know how they were able to pull it off, especially at the student level. I’m looking forward to seeing that one on a big screen.
KM: Free For Girls (2008) is not in the program, and I feel very passionately about it because of that. It’s the only one where I forgot that I was curating for the archive because it was so affecting. And maybe in the future, it will be programmed at other retrospectives. I hope it will be.
I feel like while curating, I saw a lot of reflections on video, screens, and just film itself—you see it in Free For Girls and also in Colour Bars (2005), and I think a lot of us do that now. It’s a natural thought process that I think a lot of us share.
LFP: I think we watched like, at least a few dozen films: a bunch of DVDs and all of the digital scans. It was a lot. Like over 30 films, I would say.
LD: We definitely saw some weird shit. But overall, there were a lot of films with themes of rebellion and angst. We chose some of those, others didn’t make it. Other films were quite niche subcultures—portraits of specific groups—Eddy kind of falls into that. Snow What (1975), our first film in the curation, is definitely one of those. But rather than having one singular thematic through line, we wanted to have a tonal balance across the eight films chosen.
One of the strengths of student work is that it often says more about the people making it than the world at large, because it has a rougher, vulnerable quality to it. It’s also a reflection of Toronto youth at that time.
I think if people, especially student filmmakers, go to the retrospective, it could spur this idea of oh I don’t have to make a three-act narrative film, I can make a film about a ski hill, a garbage man, et cetera. If people can go and see this perspective of the program’s heritage, then maybe we, as student filmmakers, can think not just outside of the box, but outside of our moment in time.
The TMFF Retrospective screens on May 12th, at 6:00pm at the Revue Cinema, followed by a Q&A with featured filmmakers such as Andrew Bialowas, and Graham Foy.
🎞️ Learn more about this year’s thesis programme + other events
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