Syracuse Experimental presents THE OPEN SCREEN

June 3rd, Sunday @ 7pm
The White Warehouse, aka The Big Sugar Cube
200 South Geddes Street at West Fayette
Syracuse, New York

BYOFV! (Bring Your Own Film / Video)
Make sure your work is cued, maximum 10 minutes in length, first come first screened. Accepted formats: 16MM, SUPER 8, DVD, VHS, cassettes. Refreshments will be available, but BYOB as well.

"The Open Screen" is an informal forum for local filmmakers and video artists presented in conjunction with a region wide arts collaboration, including the opening of Lipe Art Park, the exhibition ReZist!, and an open house in the White Warehouse / Arts Building.

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SYRACUSE EXPERIMENTAL Film & Media Workshop
A cooperative of artists and educators working to promote and encourage the creation (through experimentation) of film and media as an art form. Info: syracusefilmworkshop@yahoo.com
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Michael Sicinsky on Valery's Ankle

"Valery's Ankle is angry, ferocious, and pulls no punches in its exploration of the dark underbelly of Canadian masculinity. Kashmere's film examines hockey, and hockey violence in particular, as the return of the repressed in the Canadian psyche, the place where fears of cultural inferiority and an overdeveloped sense of polite civilization suddenly burst forth as animal vengeance. [...] Kashmere's editing is, as they say, bravura. His escalating montages of slashes, highsticking, and frequent bareknucle brawls not only demonstrate his thesis; they also viscerally convey the horrific intensity and secret vicarious pleasure such violence produces in the spectator. We're implicated by Kashmere's neo-Futurist cavalcade of speed and savagery, and this makes the artist's grave tone all the more disturbing. Other Canadian filmmakers (most notably John Greyson, Atom Egoyan, and Guy Maddin) have explored hockey as an essential yet problematic part of Canadian identity, although not in this degree of depth. But where those men leavened their considerations with humor, Kashmere never lets us off the hook. If the official history of Canada is one of clean cities, good government and multicultural tolerance, the counternarrative of Valery's Ankle demonstrates a kind of Law of Conservation with respect to masculine brutality. It all ends up on the ice, under the sanction of sport, and Kashmere tells us in no uncertain terms that this simply isn't good enough. And I wouldn't be surprised if this bracing message is one certain cultural gatekeepers weren't particularly eager to hear." FULL REVIEW

Interview with Brett Kashmere in Stylus Magazine

"This spring, between festival screenings of his film Valery’s Ankle and doing his part to expand the One Take Super 8 project, Kashmere’s been busy coast to coast, connecting the dots in a vibrant network along the way of experimental regional filmmaking that becomes—by virtue of such travel and cross-pollination—cosmopolitan." MORE

Valery's Ankle reviewed in Broken Pencil

"This rumination on hockey and violence is an essay film in the best, most Markerian sense of the term: personal, contemplative, and dense, its tightly focused topic opens nonetheless onto a broad field of inquiry. 'I don't intend to speak about hockey,' filmmaker Brett Kashmere says in voice-over early on. 'Rather I want to ask questions. Questions about nationality and sport, about collective memory, cultural amnesia, and the formation of identity.' Taking as his starting point the '72 Summit Series, Kashmere convincingly posits an anti-myth of Canadian identity. The foundation of this anti-myth is not our vaunted binary of Paul Henderson vs. Vladislav Tretiak, of Canada victorious, but rather that of Canada villainous, of Bobby Clarke vs. Valery Kharlamov. That is, what forms and defines Kashmere's Canada is a pairing that resulted not in a nation-rallying goal we still choose to remember, but rather in a brutal act of enforcement we have thoroughly and tellingly forgotten. From this primal scene, the film spirals forward and backward through hockey history, making its points through an always deft and sometimes vertiginous layering of music, text, archival footage, voice-over, re-enactment, present day footage, and broadcast audio. [...] His rapid montages of historical hockey brutality may belie the grace with which present-day players float past his camera, but in both instances we see a similar animal lyricism, a crude poetry Kashmere can conjure even from the malfunctionings of primitive Russian video equipment. Valery's Ankle accomplishes more in 30 minutes than CBC's Hockey does in all its ten hours." (Sean Rogers)