“I was elated and surprised when I learned that my new short docu won, as it was an international online competition,” said Alcedo.

Chair of the Department of Dance in 91ŃÇɫ’s School of the Arts, Media, Performance & Design (AMPD), Alcedo has directed, written and produced three documentary films in the past year. Two of his other documentary films – A Will To Dream and Am I Being Selfish? â€“ also won, respectively, Best Dance Feature Documentary and Best Inspirational Short Documentary at the Silk Road Film Awards Cannes in May. This same competition singled out They Call Me Dax as Best Dance Short Documentary.

The three films put a spotlight on issues of teenage pregnancy, illegal drugs, precarity of labour and inconsistent governmental support in poverty alleviation in the Philippines. They illustrate how dance, when partnered with grit and altruistic teaching, has the potential to navigate and even overcome these social, economic and political issues.

“As a dance ethnographer, I am passionate about putting an emphasis on dance’s ability to empower the marginalized. I want to illustrate that dance, as lived in the lives of its practitioners, is an incredible embodied form in understanding the complexities of race, class, ethnicity, gender, religious practices and diasporic/transnational identities,” said Alcedo. “As a Philippine studies scholar and a Filipino, I devote my energies and resources to fleshing out who Filipinos are, whether in the Philippines or in transnational elsewhere – from the point of view of dance, from their own dancing and choreographed bodies.”

Along the same vein of marginality as Dorothy’s story, Am I Being Selfish? focuses on the life of her fellow dancer, Jon-Jon Bides. Despite the resulting financial hardship, Jon-Jon insists on supporting his wife and two young sons by teaching ballet to poor children and at-risk youth, like Dorothy.

The feature-length documentary, A Will To Dream, anchors its narrative in the life of Luther Perez, a former ballet star in the Philippines and Dorothy and Jon-Jon’s mentor and adoptive father. To give underprivileged children and youth from squatters’ areas in Quezon City and Manila a shot in life, he surrendered his U.S. green card – and with it the promise of a better life abroad – to teach them dance.

To date, these films have garnered six official selections from film festivals and award-giving bodies such as the New 91ŃÇÉ« Independent Cinema Awards, International Shorts, Lift-Off Online Sessions and the Chicago Indie Film Awards.

Alcedo’s latest win at the Cannes Indies has caught the attention of three television stations – DZRH News of the ,  and  â€“ that together have thus far garnered more than 28,000 views.

The three films build on Alcedo’s 20-minute documentary Dancing Manilenyos, which was an official selection at the  and received an Award of Merit from the 2019 Global Shorts Competition and an Award of Recognition from the .

These three recent films would not have been possible if not for the team that Alcedo has put together. Behind these works are cinematographer Alex Felipe, editor and colourist Alec Bell, and transcriber Paulo Alcedo â€“ all 91ŃÇÉ« alumni. Additional cinematography is from John Marie Soberano and archival footage is from both Mark Gary and Denisa Reyes. Peter Alcedo Jr. did the musical scoring.

The pre-production, production and post-production of Alcedo’s films have received support from AMPD, the 91ŃÇÉ« Centre for Asian Research, the government of Ontario’s Early Researcher Awards program, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council's Research-Creation Grant.

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Janine Marchessault

Next month will bear witness to the debut of a unique and compelling project led by cinema and media arts Professor Janine Marchessault. SheĚýjoined forces with True Frame Productions’ Christian KroitorĚý(grandson of IMAX inventor Roman Kroitor) to produce XL Outer Worlds.

“Five leading Canadian media artists will create the new films in a cinematic genre typical of IMAX films: the larger-than-life landscape that forms an outer world,” Marchessault said. “This is a highly collaborative project from the School of the Arts, Media, Performance & Design, funded by the Canada Council (for the Arts). It brings together this Faculty at 91ŃÇÉ«, the Public Access Collective, Concordia University and True Frame Productions,” she added.

The project will be showcased in a variety of venues over eight months:

• It will premiere at the Images Festival in Toronto (April 18), in celebration of theĚý50th anniversary of the invention of IMAX. This festival showcases artistic excellence in contemporary moving image culture.
• Next, it will show at the Toronto Biennial of Art, Sept. 21 to Dec. 21, which seeks to connect the city’s communities around art and culture. Here, the films will play at the Cinesphere.
• ĚýAfter the Biennial, the XL Outer Worlds program will tour the first IMAX cinemas across Canada in Victoria, Sudbury, Edmonton and Montreal.

A Canada Research Chair in Art, Digital Media and Globalization (2003-13), Marchessault is the ideal academic to bring this ambitious show together. She was the co-founder of Future Cinema Lab and the inaugural director of Sensorium: Centre for Digital Arts & Technology Research at 91ŃÇÉ«. In 2012, she was awarded a prestigious Trudeau Fellowship to pursue her curatorial and public art research around the problem of sustainable development. She has (co)curated numerous large-scale public art exhibitions in Toronto and beyond, including Museum for the End of the World (2012) and Land|Slide, Possible Futures (2013). Land|Slide was named one of the best exhibitions in Canada in 2013 by Canadian Art magazine.

A glimpse at the five high-profile filmmakers

Oliver Husain will contribute to the XL Outer Worlds project with a film called Garden of the Legend of the Golden Snail, which tells that story of an elderly woman who discovers a beautiful snail that provides food for the family. The animal transforms into a princess who again transforms, this time into a large IMAX theatre. Husain’s compelling projects often start with a fragment of history or a personal encounter. He uses a wide range of cinematic languages, including dance and puppetry, to engage viewers.Ěý

Genie Award-winning filmmaker and CBC documentarian Lisa Jackson will contribute a highly original piece called Lichen. Her film will take a penetrating look at this distinctive life form, which can survive in a variety of extreme environments, including outer space, and pose the question: what can we learn from lichen? Jackson’s work often bridges into different genres hitherto confined to separate silos – the documentary, animation, virtual reality and even musicals.

Representing a new generation of artists working with digital technologies to create hyper-real, highly charged landscapes, Kelly Richardson will contribute to this project with a film that considers “generational amnesia” and the remnants of the distant past – specifically, the centuries-old trees on Vancouver Island. Over three quarters of the old-growth trees on this island have been logged. In XL Outer Worlds, Richardson will be transforming an area of threatened old growth into an imagined future landscape.

Without a doubt, the most seasoned of the filmmakers in XL Outer Worlds is esteemed artist Michael Snow, considered to be one of Canada’s most influential filmmakers. (His most well-known artworks are Walking Woman,Ěý1961, and the Toronto Eaton Centre’s permanent installation Flightstop,1979, depicting Canada geese in flight.) Snow’s films of the 1960 and 1970s were groundbreaking. For XL Outer Worlds, he is considering creating a work that elaborates on the methods he used in his avant-garde 1971 film La RĂ©gion Centrale, which was built around constant spherical motions.ĚýHe hopes to blend some of the original, landscape-based patterns with new ones, inspired by IMAX’s capacity, which reference cityscapes.

Leila Sujir, Chair of the Studio Arts Department in the Faculty of Fine Arts at Concordia University, will be participating in this project with her film titled Forest. Her subject will be the Walbran, an area on Vancouver Island that is scheduled for clear-cut logging by Teal Jones, the largest privately held forest products company on British Columbia’s coast. Over the past decade, Sujir has been experimenting with stereoscopic 3D video, extending the viewer into the space of the moving image.

Potential for an international audience

Looking to the future, Marchessault sees the potential for a global audience for this exciting project. There is already interest in an international tour.ĚýStay tuned.

Marchessault also won a $2-million partnership grant from the Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council of Canada. This important project seeks to redress the unevenness of Canadian preservation efforts thus far by emphasizing Canada’s most vulnerable moving image heritage – women’s media, Indigenous media arts, films and media from the LGBTQI+ community and archives from Canada’s immigrant communities.

To learn more about the XL Outer Worlds Project, visit the . To learn more about Marchessault, visit her .

To learn more about Research & Innovation at 91ŃÇÉ«, follow us at , watch the and see the .

By Megan Mueller, senior manager, research communications, Office of the Vice-President Research & Innovation, 91ŃÇÉ«, muellerm@yorku.ca

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