Setting a Tone - by Amber Christensen
Tonight’s opening night at Images started with a modest but poignant introduction by Artistic Director Amy Fung. Fung suggested that tonight’s film Factory Complex by Seoul based artist Heung-Soon IM, would set a tone that she hoped would be carried out throughout the festival. Factory Complex is in many ways a quiet and gentle film, that is personal and generous in it’s storytelling of the inadequate labour rights and severe working conditions of women who were (or are) employed in the factories in Korea and Cambodia. Respectful, non-exploitative and seemingly unencumbered in its aesthetic direction, Heung-Soon IM’s film is in stark contrast to other recent Images opening night that I’ve attended. I’ve only lived in Toronto for three years, and of the three Images Festival openers I’ve seen, this is the first that I felt opened up a personal relationship between subject, film, and viewer, in a way that gave me a sense of an opening up of the boundaries of the experimental filmmaking canon. I certainly hope this tone does carry through the rest of the festival, and that it finds itself into more corners of Toronto’s experimental film scene.
