Café Ex

25th Anniversary (2023 - 2024) Season

The Canadian Film Institute’s long-running guest artist Canadian experimental cinema series, Café Ex, will have its milestone 25th season this year, starting at the end of November.

Since the series began in 1998, Café Ex has presented 70 different Canadian moving image artists at its 80 shows over 24 seasons of screenings, artist talks, book launches, and interactive cinema experiences – not to mention all that amazing socializing with Canada’s top experimental moving image artists.

For our 25th season, we are thrilled to have daring, acclaimed moving image artists Kurt Walker (Vancouver-Toronto), Parastoo Anoushahpour (Toronto), and, from Ottawa, Matthieu Halle.

Of course, all three of these moving image artists will come to Club SAW to present and discuss their remarkable works in person.

We look forward to seeing you again in person at Club SAW, and we thank you for supporting these Canadian artists and this series for two and a half decades!

Tom McSorley
Executive Director
Canadian Film Institute

Where is Here?
The Moving Images of Kurt Walker

November 29, 2023 • 7:00 pm • Club SAW, 67 Nicholas St., Ottawa

Vancouver native and now Toronto-based moving image artist Kurt Walker offers a compelling and inventive cinematic language that weaves together images drawn from multimedia, gaming, and other audio-visual sources. His arresting work chronicles the peculiar sense of community that those ubiquitous moving image technologies can generate. It also suggests that perhaps modernity itself resides in our accelerated times in that very multi-layered fusion of mediated spaces with actual ones.

Locating oneself and one’s community within such technological complexity is a fascinating creative challenge taken up by Walker formally and thematically in his unique, imaginative cinema. Indeed, in Walker’s dazzling, disorienting work about our technocentric reality can be found an utterly original, urgently relevant 21st-century cinematic re-configuration of Northrop Frye’s quintessential Canadian question: where is here?

As Michael Scoular of The Cinematheque in Vancouver writes, “…Walker first came to cinema by a path only possible in this second century of the medium. Experimenting within the spaces of massively multiplayer online games like World of Warcraft, he began making machinima (a portmanteau of machine and cinema): movies that take game worlds, with their polygonal architecture, props, and model actors, as ready-made film sets. Walker’s films are likewise acts of transformative recreation informed by the time spent there, behind cameras and within games, knowing both the physical world and the digital one are marked by similar forces of dissolution, yet that the gaps opened up by these shifts allow a small and nimble cinema to chart its own course.”

We are honoured to have Kurt Walker as the first guest artist in our 25th anniversary season of Café Ex.

Program