FLEX: the Florida Experimental Film/Video Festival, will be presenting its 10th annual festival from February 21-23 at the Wooly in downtown Gainesville. This year’s festival is a curated event with curators representing six international filmmaking “scenes” presenting a program of work from their respective cities.
Friday night features a program curated by Daïchi Saïto from Montreal’s Double Negative collective at 7 p.m. followed by a live expanded cinema performance by Sally Golding, curator of the Unconscious Archives series in London (and member of the artist-run film lab no.w.here as well as co-curator of the international expanded-cinema collective OtherFilm).
Saturday begins with a roundtable discussion at 2 p.m. that will present an overview of the structure of each of these local scenes before exploring in depth the different organizational and funding models that they use. At 7 p.m., there will be a presentation of films and videos by Rei Hayama of the Tokyo-based + (Plus) group followed by an expanded cinema performance by Mexico City’s Trinchera Ensemble (Elena Pardo, Morris Trujillo, and Rafael Balboa) with Seattle-based experimental musician Eric Ostrowski providing a live score.
Sunday again begins with a 2 p.m. roundtable focused on local scenes in a global context, exploring the tensions and ironies as well as the opportunities presented by work circulating beyond their local and national contexts. Sunday night concludes the festival with programs of films and videos selected by Guillaume Cailleau of LaborBerlin at 7 p.m. and Sébastien Ronceray of Braquage (Paris) at 9 p.m.
FLEXfest 2014 is co-sponsored by the Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere, Student Government/the Fine Arts College Council, the France-Florida Research Institute, the Center for Latin American Studies, and the Center for European Studies.
All events take place at the Wooly (20 N. Main St.) and are free and open to the public.