Early Monthly Segments Presents: Keith Lock + Oliver Bancroft (in person!)

Hard to believe that next Monday, Early Monthly Segments will be presenting their 75th show! Amazing. Hats off to programmers Scott Berry, Chris Kennedy and Kate MacKay, who present avant-garde cinema once a month at the Gladstone Art Bar in Toronto. For a small admission price, you can enjoy the history of independent-experimental film the way it should be seen: projected on 16mm with an audience.


It's been joyous to see this collective grow in stature over the years: every screening I've attended has been packed! It is refreshing to still see a committed crowd support a venue that strongly adheres to the tradition of showing on film, and the rich history of a certain type of cinema that is often hard to see otherwise.

Next Monday, EMS presents Keith Lock's 1974 feature, Everything Everywhere Again Alive (pictured above): "...'the first Asian-Canadian Experimental Film' (Alice Shih, Asian Canada on Screen) and 'one of the best Canadian films of the 1970s' (R. Bruce Elder). Shot on a bolex with wild sound, the film is a reflective portrait of an artists commune on Buck Lake near Gravenhurst where Lock lived in the early 1970s and features deep personal reflection on the filmmakers relationships to nature and nurture in a collective living experiment" (taken from the EMS website). The feature is preceded by Oliver Bancroft's 2011 short film Psara's Donkey, "a document of the only donkey on the Greek island of Psara. It was the last film to be printed at London’s Soho Film Lab" (ibid).

Both filmmakers will be in attendance for this rare screening. Hopefully I can get away from work in time to show up! (No, ESR is not my full time job. If only...) If there is a Q&A, perhaps I can ask Mr. Lock about obtaining a copy of his 1993 dramatic feature, Small Pleasures.

Hope you can attend! Here is the info:

Gladstone Hotel, Ballroom
1214 Queen Street West
Monday August 24, 2015
8 PM screening
$5-10 suggested donation


For more on Early Monthly Segments and their programming, check out their website! They have also archived write-ups on their previous seventy-four screenings. Congrats to Scott, Chris and Kate, and look forward to many, many more.