2019-2022
Chris Kennedy (Canada) is an independent filmmaker, film programmer, and writer based in Toronto. He received an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute, and is currently Executive Director of the Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto. He programmed for the Images Festival (2003-06), Pleasure Dome (2000-06), and TIFF Cinematheque’s The Free Screen/Wavelengths (2012-2019). He co-founded and co-programmed Early Monthly Segments (2009 to 2018). His films have screened at 100+ film festivals worldwide and have been featured in solo shows at the Canadian Film Institute, Los Angeles Film Forum, Nam June Paik Art Center, La Plata Semana del Film Experimental and the Pacific Film Archive. He has also written extensively about film and music, including features on Akio Suzuki, Olivia Block, Metamkine, Ute Aurand, John Smith, and others. His film “Watching the Detectives” won the Ken Burns Award for the Best of the Festival at the Ann Arbor Film Festival (2018). His work as an artist and programmer operates in dialogue with the history of film as art, exploring the medium’s materiality in a contemporary context.
Often combining a careful concern with the apparatus and a high degree of formal rigour with thoughtful attention to social reality and history, Kennedy’s films examine the interpenetration of a kind of phenomenology – how the things of the world appear to consciousness – with the material possibilities of film (multiple exposures, hand processing, found footage, multi-frame presentations). – Scott Birdwise
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