SCA Alumni at Images Festival

SCA alumni are well-represented at the 2019 Images Festival, which runs April 11 – 18 across multiple venues in Toronto. Included in the festival's programming are works by Lisa Jackson (world premiere of Lichen), Ryan Ermacora and Jessica Johnson (the North American premiere of Labour/Leisure), and Casey (KC) Wei, who is featured in the festival's Canadian Artist Spotlight with the Toronto premiere of Murky Colours, which she completed for her MFA. Here's how Images Festival Artistic Director Steffanie Ling describes the work:  

Murky Colours is based on a spy novel by Menjin Wei, the filmmaker’s father. It is not, by any measure, a conventional adaptation, although it does begin to chart the poetics of one. Through the arena of participatory documentary and film essay, fiction and document seem to conspire to tell a story of an unrealized film as family heirloom.

Menjin’s novel was written with the aspiration of being adapted into a Hollywood film. In his daughter’s adaptation, all the markers of the genre are present but unravel through KC Wei’s arrangement of drama and archive that come together with a writerly consideration.

Action scenes are intercut with Wei interviewing her father, him reading from his manuscript, gonzo footage of their family trip to China, and Hollywood and Hong Kong action films. Her editing and post-production techniques amplify the tropes of spy movies and pulp novels. The adaptation of Murky Colours, revitalized within its own lifetime, pulls its viewer into considering the internal chronologies of an artwork.

Also presenting at the festival is new SCA Assistant Professor in the film area, Sky Hopinka, who will be showing Dislocation Blues.

Visit the Images Festival website for the complete schedule.