RESFEST

RESFEST

Last night, RESFEST, North America’s hippest and most cutting-edge video festival, hit Toronto, with a Nike-sponsored opening night party at Supermarket in Kensington Market. The festivities featured ONE SELF (DJ Vadim, Yarah Bravo, Blu Rum 13) and followed screenings of some of RESFEST’s slickest international shorts, as well as Rock the Bells, a documentary about concert promoter Chang Weissberg’s quixotic quest to book the Wu Tang Clan in 2004.

Don’t fret—there’s plenty more to come. Tonight, the festival will put on a program of the best shorts it has shown since its birth at a San Francisco gallery ten years ago. Then they’ll screen some of the most innovative music videos of the moment in a program called Videos that Rock.

Events continue all weekend long, with intriguing short film programs, an ode to Radiohead’s influence on the art of the music video, and a keynote lecture by director Dougal Wilson. The highlight will no doubt be the screening of Paul Frank presents the Vice Guide to Travel (Sunday, Dec. 3, 8:30 p.m.) a documentary-ish film where correspondents from Vice magazine are sent to the planet’s most bizarre and perilous corners. See Vice adventurers (including Johnny Knoxville and the magazine’s founders) goof about with Congan Pygmies and among the radioactive hell of Chernobyl. Whether you love Vice or hate it, this one’s probably worth a shot. The screening is free to those who show up early. Those who don’t want to wait in line, can purchase the film on-line. All RESFEST screenings take place at Theatre D at the Royal Theatre (608 College Street West).

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And in a bit of good news for homegrown film, seven feature-length Canadian movies have been selected for this year’s Sundance Film Festival. The films slated to get a showing in Park City this January are Sarah Polley’s Away From Her, Jennifer Baichwal’s Manufacturing Landscapes, which will receive its international premiere, Andrew Currie’s Fido, S. Wyeth Clarkson’s Sk8 Life, Petr Lom’s Canadian/Norwegian co-production On a Tighrope , the world premiere of Ian Iqbal Rashid’s How She Move, and Laurent Salgues’ Rêves de poussière.