Celebrated female-centric film collective and festival, Etheria, curates a special screening event in Toronto.
It’s no secret that plenty of international productions end up being filmed in Toronto, its locations often subbing for some other city. But because of this, many Canadian writers, directors, editors and assorted craftspeople end up employed in these productions and a great deal of the heaviest hitting local talent are made up of women. And these women don’t just work behind the scenes of the bigger productions, they are striking out on their own, helping to build a vibrant Toronto indie filmmaking culture that is currently at its apex.
In honor of this, and of February being Women in Horror Month, the US based, internationally represented Etheria Film Night will be setting up a special, one shot event in the city, a co-presentation with The Faculty of Horror Podcast (which features writer Andrea Subissati and SHOCK writer Alexandra West) and Ultra 8 Pictures, that is designed to showcase new genre films from emerging women directors.
The gig goes down on February 20th at Toronto’s legendary The Royal Cinema (608 College Street). After the screenings there will be a panel discussion featuring a diverse cast of women involved in various professions centering around genre film culture. Tickets are $10 and available in advance here.
Here’s the full film lineup and panel personnel from the official Etheria press release:
De noche y de pronto (Spain)
Directed by Arantxa Echevarria
Runtime: 19.53
Home alone in a deserted apartment building during the Christmas season, Maria is startled to receive a visit from a desperate man claiming to be her upstairs neighbor, whose apartment is being broken into by thieves. *2015 Etheria Jury Award Recipient*
And They Watched (Canada)
Directed by Vivian Lin
Runtime: 6.36
A horror morality tale about the custodian of an electric chair and its last casualty. Inspired by the recent reinstatement of the electric chair in Tennessee, US.
Mittens (Canada)
Directed by Amanda Row
Runtime: 3:00
An elderly man discovers a lost mitten and begins a paranoid search for its owner.
Seiren (Canada)
Directed by Kat Threlkeld
Runtime: 18.00
After a supermodel is bitten in the water by a mysterious creature while on a photo shoot at the beach, an infection takes hold that changes her behavior and appearance. Over time she turns into one hell of a demonic sea siren thats thirsty for blood.
Slut (US)
Directed by Chloe Okuno
Runtime: 20.49
A naive young girl becomes the target of a murderous sociopath when she attempts to reinvent herself to impress the boys in her small Texas town. *2015 Etheria Audience Award Recipient*
Panel: The films will be followed by an onstage panel discussion led by Toronto-based film critics and horror experts of The Faculty of Horror Podcast.
Amanda Row is a writer and director born and raised in Toronto, Ontario Canada and is a total creep. Directing her own unsettling films since she was a 10 year old kid with a camcorder, she graduated from Ryerson Universitys Film Studies program in 2011. Her short micro-budget horror film Mitten, which received numerous accolades and played in almost a dozen film festivals all over the world, grabbed the attention of producers on the Emmy Award winning Netflix original series Hemlock Grove in 2013. She was hired to direct a series of nightmares that spanned the entire second season, and was most recently brought on to direct the murder visions for season one of Fox Networks new Minority Report series in 2015. After landing representation at The Gersh Agency and The Gotham Group in Los Angeles, Amanda is currently developing a horror feature film. Her original horror anthology web series The Creeps will also be released in October 2016.
Kat Threlkeld holds a Bachelor of Fine Art in film and video from OCAD University. In addition she has completed a practicum in Documentary Filmmaking at Seneca’s college’s Documentary Filmmaking Institute where she won the Allan King award for “Best Documentary” in her class in 2011. She has also studied Special effects and beauty make-up for film and television at Ryerson University and designed the creature for her first short horror film Seiren. Other credits include the short films: Astrid (2009) and Extinction (2010) which she wrote, directed, produced and starred in.
Vivian Lin is a Toronto-based director and writer. As a director, her short film And They Watched, a horror morality tale, is an Official Selection of Sitges International Film Festival, Holly Shorts Film Festival, Shriekfest, Mile High Horror Film Festival, and more. It is a part of the horror film anthology Fun Size Horror: Volume 2. Her previous directing credits include the short film Four Walls starring Nina Dobrev (Vampire Diaries) and Brendan Jeffers (Degrassi: TNG), and the comedy play The Mirror, which premiered at the Montreal Fringe Festival. In 2015, she was awarded Telefilm Canadas New Voices Award for writing. Her half-hour television pilot 100 Blackouts was a Top 10 Finalist in Final Drafts Big Break Screenplay Competition, and won the Bronze Prize in the Page International Screenplay Competition.
Brigitte Rabazo was 1st Assistant Editor on all three seasons of Bryan Fullers Hannibal and the editor for each seasons Comicon trailer, as well as the third seasons first look trailer. Past projects includes Guillermo del Toros feature film Pacific Rim, Edgar Wrights Scott Pilgrim VS the World, Louis Leterriers The Incredible Hulk, Ron Howards Cinderella Man, Kathryn Bigelows K-19 The Widowmaker, and George Romeros last three features Land of the Dead, Diary of the Dead, and Survival of the Dead. In 2012, Rabazo won the CCE (Canadian Cinema Editors) Award for Best Editing in a Broadcast Half Hour Drama for her editing work on the cult TV series Todd and the Book of Pure Evil.
Richelle Charkot is a Toronto-based freelancer who currently contributes to Rue Morgue Magazine and Broken Pencil Magazine regularly. She is also the co-producer and blog editor of Toronto-based feminist screening series The MUFF Society, and the programming & marketing associate at The Royal Cinema. You can find her four coffees and two bags of popcorn deep at basically any given moment of the day.
Laura Perlmutter is an award winning film, television and digital media producer. After attending the Canadian Film Centres Producers Lab program in 2011, Perlmutter co-founded First Love Films with Andrew Nicholas McCann Smith. Their work has shown internationally with distinction and awards at TIFF, Sundance, Locarno, and Claremont-Ferrand. In 2015, First Love won a Canadian Screen Award for their film HOLE. Perlmutter is alumnus of CFC, TIFF Studio, Berlinale Talents, and Trans Atlantic Partners. She recently produced the successful sci-fi/fantasy web series Riftworld Chronicles, soon to be a major TV series.
See you at the show!
