January 30th, Filming Family: An Evening with Su Friedrich

Monday, January 30th, Theatre opens @ 5:20 p.m.
Media Commons Theatre, 3rd floor, Robarts Library
130 St. George Street, University of Toronto

Experimental filmmaker and Professor of Visual Art at Princeton University, Su Friedrich will visit the University of Toronto to screen her most recent autobiographical film, I CANNOT TELL YOU HOW I FEEL (2016, 44 min). The screening will be preceded by her earlier family film, THE TIES THAT BIND, 1984, 55 min.), with filmmaker Q and A following the double feature.

5:30 p.m.  THE TIES THAT BIND (1984)

A personal film evocatively crafted from her mother’s account of growing up in Nazi Germany. The maker’s questions and responses are etched onto the film emulsion and interleaved with black and white imagery. Glimpses of her mother at work and leisure, footage from the filmmaker’s travels to her mother’s former home in Germany, and a montage of Americana patriotism and women’s activist protest alike convey the sense that mechanisms of survival and resistance have been transmitted from mother to daughter across the divide of history and culture.

6:30 p.m. I CANNOT TELL YOU HOW I FEEL (2016)

Friedrich takes up the camera again to document a new stage in family life. Her mother, Lore, again occupies the lead role, unhappily relenting to join an ‘independent living’ facility. Together with her two siblings, the filmmaker struggles to come to terms with her mother’s resistance to this transition, employing both humour and compassion to comment on human frailty more generally.

7:30 p.m. FILMMAKER Q & A

Co-sponsors: Cinema Studies Institute, Germanic Languages & Literatures, Mark S. Bonham Centre for Studies in Sexual Diversity