What is Wavelengths?
Wavelengths is about discovering vital and original forms of cinema outside of the mainstream.
What is one of your most memorable discoveries?
Chris Chong Chan Fui's Block B. Showing it in 2008 led to a series of wonderful events for the film. It won the Award for Best Canadian Short Film, it was purchased by the Hirshhorn Museum at the Smithsonian, and it facilitated the completion of Fui's first feature film—which went on to premiere at the Director's Fortnight in Cannes. It was the start of a thrilling and well-deserved trajectory.
What classic film would you remake?
How about a kinetic dance film combining characters from Bresson's Lancelot du Lac and the gymnasts in Rivette's Out 1?
Your sympathetic film villain? The fashionable Irma Vep, robbing the rich from Paris rooftops in Louis Feuillade's Les Vampires .
Andréa Picard joined the programming team for TIFF Cinematheque (née Cinematheque Ontario) in 1999. She has curated the Toronto International Film Festival's Wavelengths section since 2006 and has been a regular contributor to TIFF's Future Projections and former Visions programmes.
Picard has programmed numerous directors' retrospectives and thematic shows for TIFF Cinematheque, including Factory Empire: The Films of Andy Warhol, Taipei Stories: The Cinema of Edward Yang, States of Longing: Films from the Berlin School, This Time Tomorrow: The Zanzibar Films, Under the Spell: Surrealism and the Cinema, Time Regained: Manoel de Oliveira, Catherine Breillat's Anatomies of Desire, and OFFSIDE: Jafar Panahi. She has been instrumental in bringing contemporary auteurist films to Toronto for Exclusive Engagements, such as Maren Ade's Everyone Else, Serge Bozon's La France, Raya Martin's A Short Film of the Indio Nacional, Jiayin Liu's Oxhide and James Benning's Casting a Glance, as well as new prints of Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman and the restored Berlin Alexanderplatz. From 2005 to 2011, she was the curator of The Free Screen, an ongoing series exploring the history, as well the ever-changing evolution of avant-garde film and video and its intersections with other artforms. Artists championed by Picard include Hollis Frampton, Lav Diaz, Tacita Dean, Coleen Fitzgibbon, Ken Jacobs,Yvonne Rainer and José Antonio Sistiaga.
Picard has also contributed successful exhibitions and film programmes to numerous local festivals, including the Images Festival and the Scotiabank Nuit Blanche festival, as well as to international museums like Le Centre Pompidou in Paris..She has curated exhibitions of work by Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Thailand), Lonnie van Brummelen and Siebren de Haan (the Netherlands), Michael Snow (Canada), Harun Farocki (Germany), Chris Chong Chan Fui and Yasuhiro Morinaga (Malaysia-Japan), Ben Rivers (the UK), David Lamelas (Argentina), Tacita Dean (the UK), Nina Könnemann (Germany). She is currently working with Greek artist-filmmaker Athina Rachel Tsangari on an exhibition that will be presented in New York, at Documenta in Kassel and Toronto.
An accomplished writer on film, art and architecture, her essays and articles have been published in numerous international journals, magazines, anthologies, gallery and artist monographs. Her longstanding "Film/Art" column for Cinema Scope magazine explores the junctions between cinema and the visual arts. Most recently, Picard published an essay on Austrian artist Josef Dabernig in "Film Unframed", a survey of the Austrian avant-garde edited by award-winning filmmaker Peter Tscherkassky.
Picard has sat on juries for numerous organizations, including festivals in Toronto, Chicago, Cleveland, Berlin, Copenhagen, Paris, Buenos Aires, Vancouver, Torino, Rotterdam, Istanbul, and for The Guggenheim Foundation and Creative Capital (New York).