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Tenk : Split Focus

Ann Cvetkovich explores the concept of political depression in her 2012 memoirist collection of critical essays Depression: A Public Feeling. Forged out of political turmoil—be it the effects of a fascist electorate, natural devastations, predatory police state, continual war-mongering, epidemic threat, an unrelenting housing crisis, or the abusive domestic realm—this physiological and social ailment engages a tension "between the everyday business" and “the urgency of disaster.” Cinematically, political depression results in tense imagery, at times static, at times freewheeling; tremulous and unknowable, political depression launches a flagrant way of seeing, a layered and laboring visuality—"a split focus". 


In Split Focus, a spotlight programme featuring works from the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre’s (CFMDC) collection, the filmic avant-garde mirrors the embodied and felt textures of this public feeling. Think, the tedium of daily commutes, where a seated factory worker in a crowded bus flits in and out of interrupted slumber, cataloging her eye contact with numerous passersby.

TERRITORY & SOLIDARITY: The daily work of CFMDC takes place in Tkaronto (Toronto) which is covered by Treaty 13 signed with the Mississaugas of the Credit, and the Williams Treaty signed with multiple Mississaugas and Chippewa bands. We also acknowledge The Dish with One Spoon treaty between the Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee that covers the land of what is now called southern Ontario. We work with the knowledge of the importance of recognition of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and the four First Nations Principles of OCAP®. As a Media Arts organization we draw your attention to the work of the National Indigenous Media Arts Coalition (NIMAC). As part of  anti-colonial solidarity, CFMDC board and staff proudly commits to the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI). Calls to support PACBI and the wider Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) come from Palestinian civil society and are grassroots strategies opposing the colonization of Palestine by directly targeting complicity.

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Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre

209 - 401 Richmond Street West  

 Toronto, ON, M5V 3A8

  416-588-0725

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