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Hosted by Open City Cinema, the 2nd annual Winnipeg Underground Film Festival will be a raucous three-day celebration of fantastic avant-garde and experimental short films and videos from around the world. This year’s edition will run on June 27-29.

The fest opens on June 27 at 7:00 p.m. with a unique bang of an idea: “The 90 Second.” This is a program super-duper short films collected from all over the world, from right in the fest’s hometown of Winnipeg to Auckland to Chicago to London and numerous points in between.

Another one of the fest’s main highlights is a two-part celebration of the work of prolific Canadian film artist Mike Hoolboom. Two programs of two short films each will be featured. The first runs on June 28 at 3:30 p.m. with the films Frank’s Cock and Tom; and the second will close the fest on June 28 at 8:00 p.

September is here again, and it's time to delve into the cinematic bounty of the Wavelengths section of the Toronto International Film Festival, that rambunctious and idiosyncratic corner of the Reitman Machine largely cordoned off from commercial concerns and set aside for lovely and sometimes difficult film art. Despite the ever-changing profile of Tiff, stalwart programmer Andréa Picard has [cue needle-scratching-record sound] What? Yes, last year at this time, the avant-garde community thought we were seeing Ms. Picard leaving this position behind. Fortunately for us all, Tiff won her back.

And this is where things get interesting. Starting with this 2012 edition of the festival, the Wavelengths section is a much more broadly based, festival-wide category. In essence, it now subsumes the old Visions designation, which was Tiff’s home for formally challenging, feature-length arthouse fare. This merger, which may seem like a bit of a shotgun wedding to some, does in fact make sense.

By merging the former Visions into the Wavelengths section, Cameron Bailey has essentially made a new incontournable programme. Headed by Andréa Picard, the section which at a time was populated by medium to short run times now includes some of the bigger names in innovative feature film filmmaking who have no qualms about bending the medium. This year the sections includes long, medium and short length works from the likes of Ben Rivers, Athina Rachel Tsangari, Carlos Reygadas (pic of his controversial Post Tenebras Lux above), Wang Bing, Mati Diop (actress from Claire Denis and Antonio Campos films) and our very own writer Blake Williams who makes it two for two at Tiff with Many a Swan – he previously had Coorow-Latham Road programmed last year. Here’s the complete A to Z listing and well-worth reading descriptions.

Pairings

The Capsule Athina Rachel Tsangari, Greece, 37’ A bevy of gorgeous Gothic...