Doors Open – Blooming Intimacies: The 401 Commons Film Curation

One weekend a year, dozens of sites open their doors for Doors Open Toronto, a city-wide celebration recognized as one of Toronto’s most culturally significant events. The City of Toronto is excited to work with the community to showcase their sites to residents and visitors.

Together, imagineNATIVE, Reel Asian, FADO, VTape, and SAVAC collectively known as the 401 Commons are pleased to present Blooming Intimacies: The 401 Commons Film Curation. We invite drop-in visitors into the Bachir Yerex gallery space to view a rotation of films hand-picked by this year’s leading curators Kaitlynn Tomaselli and Kelly Lui.

Blooming Intimacies brings together films that represent the relations formed within The Commons. Revisiting past works alongside recent ones, this program weaves notions of intimacy and blooming collectiveness that reflect upon our stories, lands, communities, and traditions.

Whether through the sweeping motion of a broom or in the moment of collective suspense before rainfall, these artists contemplate film as a process and record for witnessing transference, growing feelings, and ecological relations.

Together, we celebrate the abundance of artistic realities.

May 28, 2022
Bachir Yerex Gallery, The Commons
4th floor
401 Richmond Street West
10AM–5PM

Featured Films

Tengri

Director: Alisi Telengut

Canada | 2012 | 5:34 min | Mongolian | Experimental Short

Wind burial, influenced by Shamanism, is an old Mongolian tradition. When someone dies, the corpse is carried on a cart until a bump causes the body to fall. The place where the corpse lands becomes a simple tomb.

Alisi Telengut

Alisi Telengut is a Canadian artist of Mongolian origin. She creates animation frame by frame under the camera with mixed media to generate movement, and explore hand-made and painterly visuals for her films.

The Rain After

Director: Mohammad Fauzi

Indonesia | 2014 | 12:06 min | No dialogue | Experimental Short

The Rain After explores this relationship in the midst of producing an image. For the duration of the film, a group of children in a residential area in Jakarta pose in front of the video camera in a manner that subjects typically pose for still images.

Mohammad Fauzi

Mohammad Fauzi is a researcher and filmmaker. His work has been shown in OK. Video “FLESH” 5th Jakarta International Video Festival, Indonesia Art Festival, Hamburg International Short Film Festival, ARKIPEL Jakarta International Documentary & Experimental Film Festival, and BFI London Film Festival.

Maigre Dog

Director: Donna James

Canada | 1990 | 7:50 min | No Dialogue | Experimental Short

Maigre Dog celebrates the Jamaican women who nurtured Donna James and surrounded her with their vernacular language. The tape reveals layers of thought, whispers of memories, circles of knowing, which together evoke the complexity of the life process.

Donna James

Donna James was born in Kingston, Jamaica in 1960. Her work often focuses on reconciling loss through personal exploration, and a re-examination of storytelling and oral history using interviews as a dialectic tool.

STAND-SIT-LIE

Director: Gustaf Broms

Sweden | 2020 | 4:30 min | No Dialogue | Experimental Short

The film features Old Tjikko at Fulufjället in northern Sweden, considered by some one of the oldest living trees with a root system that dates about 9,600 years. Standing with the tree at sunrise brought on thoughts regarding being in our different bodies. How does mobility shape the experience of worlds?

Gustaf Broms

Gustaf Broms is a Swedish visual artist working in performance, video and photography. His practice is engaged with the exploration of the nature of consciousness, the dualistic concept of “I,” as the biological reality of being in the BODY, and being MIND, as the perceived experience of the flow of phenomena.

Odehimin

Director: Kijâtai Veillette-Cheezo

Canada | 2019 | 2:45 min | French/Anishinaabe w English Subtitles | Experimental Short

A stunning and poetic reminder of the importance of self-love and acceptance through the odehimin (heart berry) teaching.

Kijâtai Veillette-Cheezo

Kijâtai Veillette-Cheezo is an artist/activist born in Val-d’Or, Quebec. As an emerging filmmaker, they create work that reflects Indigenous realities while working to build bridges between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people.

Presenting Partners

The Commons @ 401 is a shared-space initiative of five non-profit arts organizations: FADO Performance Art Centre; imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival; SAVAC (South Asian Visual Arts Centre); Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival; and Vtape. Occupying the west end of 401 Richmond’s fourth floor, The Commons represents the largest tenant-led renovation in the building’s history. It contains offices for each organization, as well as shared, publicly accessible multipurpose spaces, including The Bachir/Yerex Presentation Space, a research centre, a meeting room, and a social and reception area.