Fabulous Festival of Fringe Film

Fabulous Festival of Fringe Fi

August 2007

Introduction
Welcome to our Sixth Year!

Myke Dyer

It is with great pleasure that The Grey Zone Collective and the Durham Art Gallery bring you another program of film, video, and installation to the rural beauty of Durham and Grey County.

As we enter our 6th year we are making a significant date change. The festival is now taking place one month earlier then it has in the past. The main reason for the change is the desire to hold more screenings in outdoor venues. We discovered that it gets cold at night in late August.

We are pleased to welcome back as a venue the Symphony Barn, complete with cattle, birds and an assortment of cats. The Saugeen River provides a breathtaking back-drop for our outdoor screenings, and the Hanover Drive-In, a dying breed in Ontario, remains the Festival favourite venue.

What is it about Winnipeg as the most prolific centre of Canadian independent film? It seems every year we program a Guy Maddin film and this year we turn to Mike Marynik from the Winnipeg Film Group. Mike has programmed a series of short films shot on a shoestring budget.

Our international curator, Perttu Rastas, brings an arm load of contemporary Finnish films and at the Drive-In, guest curator Vicky Chainey Gagnon parks us under the stars for a night of ‘Love and Automobiles.’

For the 2007 version of the Fab Film Fest Tony Massett made an open call for film and video. He then gathered a jury of local citizens comprised of teachers, town councillors, policemen and business owners to judge and choose an evening of film. The results will surprise you.

The documentary program should appeal to those of you having trouble sleeping at night. We are presenting two films made by filmmakers who suffer from insomnia and in an effort to find answers turn the camera on themselves.

In 2006 Lesley Chan held a group of youngsters in undivided attention, teaching our first ever animation workshop. The participants scripted, created backdrops and characters and produced magical works using stop frame animation. Lesley is back with another workshop for kids and one for adults.

The Durham Art Gallery will host two installations curated by Ilse Gassinger, including the enigmatic and riveting The Way Things Go. And returning for another year Philly Markowitz will close the festival out with a night of music and film. This finale asks the audience to consider the industrialization of our food sources while Toronto Afrobeat band Mr Something Something grooves on the stage of the Symphony Barn.

Finally, we are pleased to ride tandem, as it were, with the first annual Rocky River Cycling Festival here in Durham. As part of this cycling weekend we are presenting a selection of short cycling films.

What is fringe film? We’re still wrestling with that one. But we do know that a film festival should challenge, provoke and evolve. We hope that over the last five years we have earned the right to become a living and breathing event that promotes film and video as an art form rather then a commodity.

We welcome you to the Fabulous Festival of Fringe Film.