The 50th Thessaloniki International Film Festival

Karpo Godina, Litany of Happy People (1969-71)
Changing notions of what now constitutes ‘mainstream culture’ mean that ideas such as ‘underground’, ‘avant-garde’ or ‘oppositional’, are also in flux. The particularly thorough approach that Bourikas brings to the presentation of avant-garde film allows us to, as he says, “extract the context’” which, in the 20th century, gave the ethos of art experimentation such vitality.

TIFF’s Serbian Kino Clubs screenings, for instance, revive to memory the role that filmmakers in (then) Yugoslavia played in the international conversation about avant-garde film. A legacy of Tito’s program for ‘popular technological education’, the true origins of the Kino Clubs are in avant-garde notions about the revolutionary potential of film technology itself.

Bruce LaBruce in Conversation with Rosemary Heather

Canadian art provocateur Bruce La Bruce
Bruce sees porn as the last radical art form

Well, Googie in Super 8½says “I don’t give a damn about continuity.” And it is kind of a luxury, continuity. Because you have to have a person who is specifically hired to do that job and you really need someone who knows what they’re doing. The person who was doing it on Otto had no clue what she was doing and she’d never done it before and she would come to me and explain all the continuity errors of a scene that I just shot after the fact. And I’d be like, “Oh well, thanks for telling me now”. After everything had been shot…