Guelph Film Festival takes flight
The Guelph Film Festival kicked off with a reception at the Boarding House Gallery on Sat, Oct. 15. The festival’s precursor film was entitled Julian, a film centered around University of Guelph alumnus and Guelph resident of the same name. Julian is famous in Guelph for his pet pigeon named Foegli. Both Julian and Foegli were in attendance for the film.
The film was shown in the Capacity 3 Gallery, which is a small room under the stairs with a capacity for three people.
“We’re using this as a sort of precursor for the festival, so it’s going to run for three weeks into the festival,” said Carolyn Meili, coordinator of the Guelph Film Festival. “Because this film is in a space that fits very few people, we wanted it to be open for a longer period of time so people can have a more intimate viewing of it.”
Filmmaker Julia Furer made the movie as part of her last project in film school. The film introduces Julian as he builds harpsichords in his workshop in Zurich. The workshop itself is in an abandoned railroad station that is set to be demolished within two months of the beginning of the film and it introduces Julian as a man who lives on the fringes of society trying to work on his craft.
“It’s quite interesting to talk to the subject of the film and see how he feels about it,” said Meili. “He said it brought out his existential self.”
“We occupy this ecological niche of quasi-holiness that neither of us can occupy alone.”
The Ontarion had the chance to talk with Julian following the film, and the discussions stretched from ecology to the internet as a new mode of communication to the main thesis of our discussion, namely, attention economics.
Matteo Cimellaro: Where did you meet Julia?
Julian: I was just trying to get out of that workshop and there was Julia just trying to film. Well, there was this nice group of artistic people around this condemned railroad station. Julia was there working on a film. She was a student volunteer with this Swiss movie.
MC: Why are you so passionate about making harpsichords?
J: The keyboard itself is a very interesting thing. What drew me to keyboards was just a theoretical interest in music and how the keyboard is a conceptualization of the musical scale. When people write books about music and they give examples, they’ll give you a musical example written in notation, and if you have a piano you can find out what the example says. I’m not a musician, I guess the piano is the non-musician’s musical instrument par excellence. What I love about it is that it’s very useful to study about music. And [the harpsichord] is not really a musical instrument. It was intended to help train choirs after the period of the black death.
MC: How long have you and Foegli been friends?
J: I met him on July 3, 2015. I was suicidal and I saw this little baby bird wandering in traffic. His vulnerability distracted me from my own. It’s other people meeting you that makes things meaningful.
MC: Your saving Grace?
J: Yes. The pigeon catalyzed all these encounters. He attracted all these people’s attention. We are a symbiotic organism. We occupy this ecological niche of quasi-holiness that neither of us can occupy alone. I mean, alone I get the police called on me and alone he gets the exterminators called on him, but together we are suddenly this neat, neat being. A symbiosis.
Photo by Julia Furer.