Monsieur Lazhar is nominated for Best Foreign Film at the 2012 Academy Awards.

Produced by the team that brought Incendies to the screen last year, this Quebecois film by director Philippe Falardeau is a funny, authentic story about what we say when we talk to each other about death. Algerian political refugee Bashir Lazhar (Mohamed Fellag) contacts a Montreal elementary school when he reads in the newspaper that one of their teachers has committed suicide at the school. Desperate for work, he offers to fill in in the classroom, and the overwhelmed principal agrees. The story focuses on Lazhar’s struggle with the often-absurd Quebec education system, and his connection with two of the students, former friends who have been deeply affected by their teacher’s death.

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The Death of the Photograph is the birth of the Image (or, is it the other way around?)

Vancouver-based artist Ken Lum will discuss issues relating to the differences between an image and a photograph. Lum will also highlight how this discursive development is important in an increasingly mediated image world.

EXPOSURE is an annual independent festival through the month of February, a celebration of Canadian and international photo-based work featuring exhibitions and educational events in Banff, Canmore, and Calgary.

Director of London's Chisenhale Gallery presents the work of this leading small scale visual arts organization with a focus on commissioning works with emerging artists.

Norway-based Canadian architect Todd Saunders has made headlines for his experimental designs using traditional methods of craft and sustainable technology. In Canada, Saunders has received widespread recognition for his work on the Fogo Island Artist Residency in Newfoundland, a series of six artists’ studios designed “off the grid”. In 2011, Saunders Architecture was awarded the AZ Award for Best Commercial Building, the Arnstein Arneberg Award for Outstanding Architecture and the HIŠE Award for Sustainable Excellence.

Co-presented by Visual Arts.

The Leading Ideas Speaker Series is supported by
The Juniper Hotel and Bistro.

A composer of chamber music as well as a solo performer of experimental noise music, Raven Chacon is known for creating musical landscapes of sinister and chaotic arrangements scored for unconscious creatures filled with dark and harrowing drones, mysterious avant-garde noise erected on the shoulder of a resonating snare rattle, bone whistle, strobe-drum, and a "mixed-blood" stringed guitar.  

A co-presentation between Presenting and Visual Arts.  

The Club is a licensed venue admitting those 14 years of age and older.

Dr. Richard Noble discusses the nature and effects of the utopian impulse in contemporary art. Focussing primarily on utopian art as a strategy for making art that might be considered political, he will identify a range of strategies through which the utopian impulse is expressed.

Part of EXPOSURE Photography Festival.

Celebrated photographer Lynne Cohen seeks and captures stark interior scenes revealing both strangeness and wit in our places of work and rest. Cohen’s early silver prints shown here were acquired as part of The Banff Purchase, a major initiative in 1979 to promote contemporary photography in Canada as a legitimate creative medium.  

Tour the studios and meet the artists in the thematic residencies Master Class: Art and the effects of the Real, with Ken Lum, and Trading Post with Candice Hopkins.

Visit both Glyde Hall and Jeanne and Peter Lougheed Building where studios are open until 6 p.m.

Finnish auteur Aki Kaurismäki returns with this politically-charged fairy tale. The life of self-taught intellectual and shoeshiner Marcel Marx (André Wilms) has an unexpected twist of fate when he discovers African refugee Idrissa (Blondin Miguel) who has just emerged from a cargo ship container in the industrial French port city of Le Havre. It’s a stylized character study that moves back and forth between deadpan dark humour and the comfortable, comic charms of classic cinema. Idrissa is absorbed into Marcel’s working-class community, pursued by a police detective, and Marcel must figure out how to get the boy across the channel to England, where the rest of his family has gone.

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Directed by Wim Wenders.

Pina Bausch is a legendary dancer and choreographer. Her unique creations transformed the language of dance and offer a visual experience like no other. This revolutionary film captures the aesthetic of Pina Bausch’s greatest works in a thrilling way.

A presentation of the Walter Phillips Gallery, the Reel Time Winter Film Series screens feature length films from the Toronto International Film Festival on the first Monday of each month.