The Taste of Summer
“You’ll have to trust me that where it seems like nothing could exist, something always does. And there’s something here.”
—Sarah Abbot, Froglight (1997)
In 2014, Phil Hoffman published a piece in Film Manifestos and Global Cinema Cultures entitled “Your Film Farm Manifesto of Process Cinema.” The text was a call to action born out of years of teaching and facilitating opportunities for artists hungry to immerse themselves in the physical medium of film at the Independent Imaging Retreat. Hoffman had conceived of this annual workshop with colleagues in 1994 on his property in Mount Forest, two hours northwest of Toronto—a rural haven that earned its nickname of the Film Farm. Though the manifesto’s first lines read more like a challenge than an invitation—“Enter through the big barn doors, without sketches and scripts, without props and actors”—the tone then shifts, turning to encouragement for those willing to eschew perfectionism for exploration. “Your films will surface through the relationship between your camera and what passes in front. It may take the whole of the workshop for you to shake away the habit of planning, what has become the guiding light of the economy-driven film world.”
Some 300 participants from around the world (two-thirds of whom have identified as women) have entered through those barn doors over the past quarter-century, and this summer the Farm marked that milestone with a
