25th Anniversary, $100 Film Festival

nineteen-seventy-eight was a big year for Hollywood. The Deer Hunter was released and Woody Allen’s Annie Hall won the Academy Award for Best Picture (insert your own PwC-mocking comment here). Grease and Saturday Night Fever were, if not highbrow cinematic events, at least hugely influential pop-culture moments. It was also a very bad year for movies (depending on your taste, you may already have surmised that); if you saw Jaws II or Attack of the Killer Tomatoes in 1978, you might still be trying to forget.

For Calgary cinephiles, however, 1978 was remarkable. It was the year a weird and wonderful era of experimental filmmaking took hold in this city. True, its influence on the Zeitgeist proved as lasting as the impact Diane Keaton’s menswear moment had on women’s fashion, but as local legend (and a recent press release from the Calgary Society of Independent Filmmakers) has it, in 1978 a dozen filmmakers got caught up “in the wave of independent artistic collectives sweeping the nation.” As a result, they formed the CSIF, with a mandate to infuse Calgary’s filmmaking community with support, vitality, and robust artistic exchange. Most of all, they banded together in order to officially celebrate the art of making “brief interplays of light and shadow, sound and silence, colour and monochrome… little perversions that keep analogue film alive,” as CSIF executive director Barry Thorson puts it.

With that in mind, the group eventually kicked off a daring event that, for the next 25 years, would define their mission to spark cinematic exploration in Calgary. The first $100 Film Festival was held in 1992, a time when four rolls of Super 8 film cost $100, received submissions from seven filmmakers and drew a capacity crowd of nearly 100 people to the basement of a church on 16th Avenue. Four years later, the fest had 39 entries from across the continent and hosted an audience of 600 people. In the two decades since, the event has dropped the $100 limit on budgets, gained a global reputation as one of the only (and best) exclusively small-format film festivals on the planet, and has received entries (many pictured above) from a dozen countries. More importantly, it has nurtured and hosted hundreds of artists devoted to the craft.

“A quarter century is a long time for anything fashioned by human hands to still be around—let alone a festival dedicated to small-format film,” says Thorson. This year’s event includes an extra evening in celebration of the milestone, and will showcase a Retrospective program on Wednesday, March 22; the visiting artist is renowned Canadian filmmaker Philip Hoffman. The first of three festival screenings goes Thursday. Tickets are $12, a princely sum in 1978, perhaps, but a contemporary bargain.