2024-2026
Canada
Barbara Sternberg (Canada) is a filmmaker born in 1945. She began making films in 1974 while attending Ryerson Polytechnic University and has since completed more than 50 films which have screened widely across Canada, as well as internationally at the Pompidou Centre, Kino Arsenal, The Museum of Modern Art, Millennium Workshop, and Cinematheque Ontario. Sternberg’s films combine reflections on vision, perception, motion, and temporality with social issues and universal questions of how we experience reality, regarding film itself as an experience of realities. She has also worked in other media including performance, installation, and video. Sternberg has taught film at York University, worked for the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre, helped to organize the groundbreaking International Experimental Film Congress in 1989, was a founding member of the Pleasure Dome artists’ film and video exhibition group and a co-founder of Struts, an artist-run centre in Sackville, New Brunswick. Her work is in the collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario and the National Gallery of Canada, among other institutions. In 2011 she received the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts. She lives and works in Toronto.
“I use many different images and allow for their multiple reading. A sense of something, of the fullness, of the complexity and relatedness of the world accumulates over the duration of the film. In depicting the contradictions and paradoxes of life, my films say ‘and’ rather than ‘or’: light and shadow, good and evil, life and death. I work with images between abstraction and representation, between thinking and feeling. When images are emptied of meaning, they approach being. I think of film as analogous to life. The ephemerality of life is echoed in the temporal nature of film, the ‘stuff’ of life in the emulsion, and the energy, the life-force in the rhythmic light pulses. Light, Energy, Life.’” —Barbara Sternberg