“The Roots That Thirst.” June 4, 2019

: Old Hat

: Pond and Waterfall

: Ceiba

“Ceiba, tú eres mi madre, dame sombra.”
“Ceiba, you are my mother, give me shelter.”
—Pilar Ruiz

The metaphors invoked by the Ceiba tree—an axis mundi in some Latin American mythologies, connecting past and present, and an historically significant marker in Cuban history as the Arbol de la Paz—form the background to this programme of Toronto premieres. Zach Iannazzi’s enigmatic Old Hat harnesses a multitude of threads and times through exacting, diaristic shots of the San Francisco Bay Area, an accumulation of experiences from a recent East Coast transplant. In Ceiba, Noé Rodriguez traces the echoes of the colonial past in the land- and soundscapes of present-day Cuba. Shot in Havana and processed at Phil Hoffman’s Film Farm (the focus of our July programme), Marcel Beltrán Fernandez’s Casa del la noche explores those same histories from the point of view of an insider, as a lived experience that is evocatively mirrored through ripped and torn celluloid. The programme is rounded out by two evocations of the water that feeds our roots, Barbara Hammer’s idyllic Pond and Waterfall and Philippe Cote’s final film, Les Ombres aquatiques, which returns us to the shadows of cinema and the sea.

Chris Kennedy

“The Roots That Thirst.” June 4, 2019