Henry Hills has been making short, intensely rhythmic experimental films since 1975. Primarily New York-based (where he frequently collaborates with composer John Zorn, choreographer Sally Silvers, and poet Charles Bernstein), he has been living half-time in Vienna since 2008, teaches at FAMU in Prague and was a Guggenheim Fellow in 2009.

This programme, curated by seminal Irish filmmaker Vivienne Dick, represents many highlights from Hills’ career, and has been similarly presented in recent months at the Austrian Film Museum, REDCAT in L.A. and Media City in Windsor, Ontario. His work, which seeks abstraction within sharply focused naturalistic imagery and the ethereal within the mundane, promotes an active attentiveness through a relentlessly concentrated montage.

Toronto-based experimental filmmaker Stephen Broomer is one of contemporary Canadian cinema's most poetic voices. His layered, densely textured celluloid tone poems (sounding echoes of David Rimmer and Philip Hoffman) probe relationships between landscape and desire, architecture and nature, physicality and spirituality, while also exploring the tangible yet ghostly experience of memory. A filmmaker and film preservationist (often working in 8mm and 16mm formats), Broomer has a BFA in Film and Video Production, an MA in Film Studies, and is presently completing his doctoral dissertation on the origins of the Canadian avant-garde film.

Broomer will attend the screening to introduce and discuss his work. The evening will also feature the official launch of a new Canadian Film Institute publication on Broomer’s work, The Transformable Moment: The Films of Stephen Broomer (edited by Scott Birdwise and Tom McSorley). Guest curator and film scholar Scott Birdwise will also attend.