Slow Burn: on the 37th annual Images Festival

When it comes to short film programming, I’ve often said there are two approaches: you’re either making a mixtape or writing a thesis. The 37th edition of Images Festival, a Toronto-based platform for experimental cinema, proposed a third: the manifesto. In their words, programming that aims “to approach moving images not merely as an escape, but as constellatory catalysts illuminating possibilities for collective liberation, both on and off the screen, on the earth and above it.” It’s an ambitious premise that asks a lot from its curators, audience, and the films themselves. With a focus on research-driven cinema, the festival programming required audiences to rapidly move between specific geographies, histories, and cultural codes, effectively road-testing how far experimental film can stretch as a vehicle for political consciousness and geopolitical literacy.

“We don’t want to be / Stars but parts / of constellations,” writes Gloria Anzaldúa in her poem The New Speakers—a passage that forms the conceptual undercurrent of this year’s festival. One such example of this imperative is the decentralized curatorial structure, which includes a sizable lineup of guest curators, alongside several partner ARCs hosting collaborative exhibitions in conjunction with the festival. The opening of the festival was hosted by Gallery TPW alongside the opening of a group show titled Never One Thing Alone, co-curated by (festival artistic director) Jaclyn Quaresma and (Gallery TPW Curator) Liz Ikiriko. The exhibition features works by Joyce Joumaa, aka TAWLA, Roï Saade, Dana Qaddah, and Sharlene Bamboat, which come together under the theme of solidarity. Recent overuse of the term makes it hard not to respond with skepticism, but the context of this year’s festival gives it a firm footing (more on that later). Bamboat’s 2-channel piece, twenty-five years swayed between our teeth (2025), which drifts between footage of a solo drummer and conversations amongst comrades, feels especially resonant, asynchronously weaving a meditation on friendship, activism, and endurance, in a fraught and exhausting era. 

A consequence of this dispersed curatorial model might have been an uneven register across programming, but if anything, the festival left me wanting more divergent tones, more zigzags, more left-field films. There were moments of thematic overdetermination, and the festival is at its most compelling when it trusts its intuition and invites a bit of discord in the mix. Two notable outliers make this case: a recent film by French artist-researcher Gala Hernández López, For Here I Am Sitting on a Tin Can Far Above the World (2024), which bridges the speculative and shady histories of cryptocurrency and cryogenics, precisely capturing the ambient unease of the current moment, and This Could Be You, a survey of Toronto artist Zeesy Powers at Vtape, curated by Kiera Boult. The exhibition features several installations by Powers, who harnesses media to reflect a hyper-contemporary complex, marked by equal parts self-doubt, longing, and anxiety— a kind of postinternet Sophie Calle, if you will. In the artist’s best-known work, I Will Tell You Exactly What I Think of You (2005–ongoing), exhibited as documentation, participants are conscripted into an awkward encounter, sitting opposite the artist as she performs a brief reading of their character. The punchline is projection; Powers’ readings reveal more about her than her counterpart. The lopsided negotiation between a declarative voice and subjective leakiness feels curiously like the act of writing about art.

Where Powers stages digital-age psychodramas, the broader festival leans into outward-facing, politically driven films, which are often paired with a cosmopolitan sensibility that finds common struggles against empire across disparate national histories. One highlight is Suneil Sanzgiri’s exhibition at Mercer Union, An Impossible Address, a video installation theatrically presented against a massive UN-style arched desk, flanked by textiles hung like flags in repose. The film draws a line between resistance movements in Angola, Goa, and Mozambique against Portuguese colonial rule, packing a dense amount of historical context without coming across as didactic or opaque.  

Each of the screenings opens with a trailer by Parastoo Anoushahpour, whose residency at the Ace Hotel in partnership with Images was abruptly cancelled after she included a statement of solidarity with Palestine in her work, ultrablue*. The trailer depicts a brief scene of a wall being wheat-pasted with an image of flowers on a black background. It’s a simple composition, but freighted with symbolism and emotion—the grassroots use of wheatpaste, the elegiac connotations of the floral arrangement. Images has stood by her—the statement appears on the festival’s website—and you get the sense that part of this year’s festival is grappling, in real time, with an arts scene plagued by censorship. Solidarity, here, is poised not strictly as a theme but as the only ethical maneuver. There’s a line in The New Speakers where the poet writes, “we do not push the hand / that writes, the times do that.” Such controversies risk overshadowing the art itself, but by foregrounding the trailer at each event, they bring it all into the fold, letting the gesture speak through and alongside the films it precedes. All of this lands as a gracefully defiant gesture against the censorious climate in which this year’s festival occurred. 

A curious addition to the programming roster is Dionne Brand’s Long Time Comin’, first released in 1993, a documentary which registers as more typical of the genre than Images’ usual milieu. The film traces the careers and friendship of musician Faith Nolan and painter Grace Channer, two celebrated Black, queer Canadian artists. Its inclusion in the program stood out. Why this film, now? What does it mean to recontextualize this moment in an era where we’re still reckoning with the function and limitations of art as politics? With a distinct brand of 1990s/Canadian earnestness, Long Time Comin’ underscores that this conversation is hardly new, and that flashpoints of political inflection recur with each generation. In recent years, the de facto tone of politically driven programming has been one of unprecedented urgency. While not wholly unwarranted, that collective intensity seems to be giving way to a slower and more sobering register. The programming at Images reflected this shift, picking up on a thread of sustained endurance echoed in works like Bamboat’s and the repertory screening of Brand’s film. It adds a rich dimension to the festival’s take on solidarity, which—like any meaningful relationship—is inevitably tested and transformed over time.

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Madeline Bogoch is a writer and film programmer currently based in Treaty 1 territory/Winnipeg.

This article is published in issue 42.2 of BlackFlash magazine. Get this issue