This event is part of the series Ground Zero: Homecoming of Richard Kerr. The filmmaker will be in attendance for a post-screening Q+A hosted by Anthony Kinik.
The Mighty Niagara Film Fest proudly presents a two part series dedicated to the St. Catharines-born experimental filmmaker, Richard Kerr. Ground Zero: Homecoming of Richard Kerr celebrates this founding member of the Escarpment School — a loose collective of filmmakers with an interest in landscape and auto-biography. Kerr has produced an expansive body of work in analog film and digital video that has screened at festivals and has been collected by museums and galleries around the world. Now based in Montreal, this is the first showcase of his work in Niagara.
Two special event screenings in this year’s festival program include a focus on Kerr’s early works Canal + The Last Days of Contrition from the 1980s presented at RiverBrink Art Museum and his most recent film Field Trip presented at The Film House at PAC where the filmmaker will be in attendance and a Q+A will be hosted by Anthony Kinik of the Brock University Film Society at PAC.
Kerr’s film The Demi-Monde (2015), a digitized celluloid collage with Hollywood footage, will be projected nightly as a free media installation on the facade of the old Town Cinema in downtown St. Catharines.
Part Two includes Kerr’s most recent film:
Field Trip 2022, Canada. Directed by Richard Kerr. 50:40 min. NR
Followed by 30 min Q+A with Richard Kerr moderated by Anthony Kinik
Field Trip is a travel diary on the American social landscape. The images consist of visual research for future film projects and were accumulated during my many location scouting trips to the United States between 1980 and 1995. Over time, I have come to regard this photographic archive as a collection of works of historical and personal value. Over the years, I began to rework the photographs. The more I handled and touched them, the less I thought of them as photographs and the more I saw them as something that could be hand-shaped, altered, transformed and re-imagined. With three voices for Joan LaBarbara, composition by Morton Feldman.
