The screening will feature top picks in three genres – riveting short fiction, provocative documentaries and cutting-edge alternative works – selected by five leading lights of the Canadian film and media scene. The winning titles will be announced at the event.

Home, a finalist in CineSiege 2012

The jurors for this year’s program are: iconic Canadian producer Robert Lantos (Barney’s Version, Eastern Promises); Emmy Award-winning filmmaker Patricia Rozema (I've Heard the Mermaids Singing, Six Gestures); experimental filmmaker Rick Hancox (Waterworx, Moose Jaw); Karen Gordon, writer, story editor and film reviewer for “Metro Morning” on CBC Radio One; and Genie Award-winning documentarian Alan Zweig (A Hard Name, I, Curmudgeon).

Jurors will be on hand at the screening to introduce the CineSiege picks and explain why they were chosen.

BBreaking Over Me, a CineSiege finalist

The jury made its selections from a shortlist of 19 productions by upper-year students, nominated from the pool of 144 short films produced in the past year by undergraduate students in York’s Film Department. In addition to genre winners, recognition is also given to exceptional achievement in specific creative and technical crafts of filmmaking: screenwriting, cinematography, sound and editing.

Also in the nominee lineup this year are six works by first and second-year students. Faculty members in the Department of Film will choose an award-winner from each year.

Nebula, a CineSiege 2012 finalist

"The remarkable productions competing for CineSiege honours are a glowing testament to the creative talent, hard work and professionalism of our students,” said Professor John McCullough, chair of the Department of Film. “Year over year, they set the bar higher. My sincere congratulations to all the nominees.”

View an image gallery of stills from the nominated films on the .

“We are grateful to our illustrious panel of jurors for giving so generously of their time and expertise to support the work of the next generation of filmmakers,” McCullough said. “And we are indebted to our event sponsor, Cinespace Film Studios, for their ongoing commitment to film education and exemplary support over the years.”

Sticks and Wheels, a finalist in CineSiege 2012

CineSiege finalists and prizewinners regularly go on to screenings and awards at home and abroad. Recent success stories include Pouyan Jafarizadeh Dezfoulian’s Morning will Come (2008), which played at the Los Angeles and Montreal film festivals, the International Experimental Film Festival in Bucharest, Romania, and won the audience vote for the Vtape Award at the 2009 Images Festival in Toronto. Mark Pariselli ‘s After  (2009) was shortlisted for the prestigious Iris Prize, won Best Short Film at Italy’s 2011 Sicilia Queer Film Festival, and has screened at more than 40 other festivals worldwide, including Paris, Athens, Seattle, Chicago, San Francisco and in Germany and Switzerland. Gerald Patrick Fantone’s Play.Stop.Rewind. (2010) was an official selection of the Montreal World Film Festival, Vancouver International Film Festival and Beijing International Student Film & Video Festival. Nikolas Tsonis’ Children of the Sun (2011) showed at Images and took top prize in the experimental category at the Savannah International Animation Festival in 2012. Emily Pickering’s What a Young Girl Should Not Know (2011) made waves at the 2012 Worldwide Short Film Festival and Janice Lee’s Faraway (2011) was presented at the Reel Asian filmfest and won a Toronto Film Critics Award in 2012.

CineSiege is made possible through the generous support of Cinespace Film Studios. The event runs one night only, Tuesday, Oct. 23 at 7pm at TIFF Bell Lightbox, 363 King St. West in Toronto. Admission is free.

For more information, visit the ���ɱ�������ٱ�.

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Ali Kazimi, professor in Department of Film in the Faculty of Fine Arts, will receive $143,186 in funding for industry standard infrastructure of a Stereoscopic 3D Lab @ York. The funding will allow Kazimi to augment and build upon the core of the stereoscopic research based production and post-production facility that has emerged out of the 3D FLIC (Film Innovation Consortium) project. S3DL @ York will become the first dedicated facility of its type in Canada, enabling the study of stereoscopic 3D story-telling practices, their production and distribution, combined with insights and best practices gleaned from stringent psycho-physical tests and experimentation. S3DL will meld art and science in the best tradition of inter-disciplinary research, enabling one to push the boundaries of the knowledge generated by the other and vice versa in a deliberate, complementary and interactive way. Kazimi will work with researchers Laurie Wilcox and Rob Allison from York’s Centre for Vision Research on this project.

, professor in the Department of Earth & Space Science and Engineering, in the Faculty of Science & Engineering, will receive $135,671 in funding for the creation of a new laboratory to support the development of next-generation space technology. This new technology will be used to measure the composition of the atmosphere from space.  The development of this advanced technology for atmospheric remote sounding will enhance Canada’s contribution to the global monitoring capacity for the climate and atmospheric communities. These contributions are necessary for Canada to maintain its access to global data sets and to provide input for the analysis and modeling of climate change and air quality – critical knowledge for a sustainable future.

, professor in the Department of Biology in the Faculty of Science & Engineering, will receive $158,237 in funding to establish a world-class laboratory to study local and large-scale brain circuits that underlie “attentional control” of behavior – processes that determine what individuals attend to and how efficient individuals are in concentrating on the most relevant sensory information in our environment. Womelsdorf’s research examines how alterations in these brain circuits lead to dysfunctions of attentional control in major neuro-psychiatric disorders (including major depression, schizophrenia, and addiction).  His research focuses on the key cognitive functions and on areas of the brain that underlie severe dysfunctions of attentional control in order to help improve diagnostic and therapeutic interventions.

Muhammed Yousaf, professor in the Department of Chemistry in the Faculty of Science and Engineering, will receive $155,537 in funding to develop infrastructure and state-of-the-art methodologies to cultivate new surface chemistries, tailor materials for fundamental studies of cell behaviour and develop next-generation biomolecular microarrays. The funds will establish a new advanced biomolecular materials laboratory at �첥��Ƶ to study how man-made materials interact with biological systems. The generation of these smart and responsive materials will provide a platform for new diagnostic screening assays of human disease and for studies of stem cell differentiation towards regenerative medical applications.

“I am delighted that the Canada Foundation for Innovation has recognized four of York’s leading researchers through these awards,” said Robert Haché, York’s vice-president research & innovation.  “CFI’s investment in state-of-the-art infrastructure further enhances York’s vibrant research culture and enables our researchers to continue to build on and expand their innovative research programs.”

York’s projects were part of a in CFI’s Leaders Opportunity Fund, which provides Canadian researchers with the necessary tools to carry out a range of frontier research. The funding supports 210 research projects across the country.

Minister of State Gary Goodyear announced the funding on Tuesday.

“Our government recognizes that investing in science and technology leads to a stronger, more innovative economy,” he said. “We understand that Canada’s research enterprise is critical to economic growth and job creation.”

“Given the right infrastructure, this talented group of innovators will create solutions that benefit Canadians and Canadians communities,” said Gilles Patry, president and CEO of the CFI.

A complete list of recipients is available on the website.

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[1.] �첥��Ƶ, Canada

�첥��Ƶ’s Department of Film [Faculty of Fine Arts] is Canada’s first, largest and most comprehensive university-based film school. Film programs are taught by 40 award-winning filmmakers and prominent scholars, all active in their field. Students benefit from comprehensive, professional training that blends theory and practice in a free-thinking and creative environment. Five hundred-plus students work in modern learning, production and screening facilities in Toronto, one of the world’s leading film capitals. �첥��Ƶ offers a mix of graduate and undergraduate programs covering a range of topics. Students explore everything from the role that film and television play in society to genre-specific topics such as the vampire in cinema or crime film.

Asian students with international filmmaking aspirations have a couple of major avenues to choose from. They can give into the Hollywood paradigm and study in LA, where they will be encouraged to conform to the system and join the filmmaking masses. Opposite this, they can seek out smaller, counter-cultural schools that put a priority on the modern film as work of art.

For those intent on pursuing the latter, a school like �첥��Ƶ is an excellent option. Based in Toronto in Canada, it offers all of the advantages of a North American education without cornering aspiring filmmakers in the Hollywood mindset.

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And as the film world continues its rapid transition from traditional 2 D celluloid film to 3 D digital, a weekend conference at the TIFF Bell Lightbox is aimed at boosting the Toronto film community’s chances of capitalizing on the next wave in film – 3-D, wrote the :

The [] conference is co-sponsored by �첥��Ƶ’s Faculty of Fine Arts and the 3-D Film Innovation Consortium (3D FLIC), a group of GTA-based film companies.

Ali Kazimi, professor in the University’s film department, said the three-day event will bring together an “eclectic mix” of filmmakers, artists, academics and theorists. “It’s a truly interdisciplinary event. We believe it’s not just a first in Canada, we believe it’s the first time anywhere in the world that these...fairly disparate groups of people have been brought together to discuss the future of 3-D cinema,” Kazimi said.

“I think this is going to be a very special event for the city. Our project has really put Toronto on the map because with this incredible sharing of knowledge,” he added.

Until the debut of Avatar in December, 2009, there was little interest in 3-D as a new frontier in film, Kazimi said. “Now everybody is jumping on the bandwagon. As a filmmaker, I feel it’s a very exciting time because when used properly, 3-D offers a whole new language for filmmakers,” Kazimi said.

The conference and 3D FLIC also involve psychology and computer science researchers within the . The centre's conference on runs June 15-18, allowing researchers to attend both events.

For more background on the Toronto International Stereoscopic 3D Conference, see its or this .

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Now in its 17th year,  is the leading venue for the exhibition and promotion of short film in North America and is one of the world’s premier short film festivals. This year it presents 275 films from 36 countries and offers one of the largest prize packages for short film in the world. Along with public screenings, WSFF hosts a professional development symposium and the largest short film marketplace in North America.

Right: Director Scott Boyd (BFA ‘07) heard about a death-defying world record attempt by a dangerously cool-headed magician and decided to turn it into a short film of epic proportions. The result is the 2007 short film Escape Clause, which will be screened as part of the WSFF's tribute to the Department of Film

WSFF’s �첥��Ƶ Retrospective celebrates the department’s 40th anniversary and the outstanding creative talent it has nurtured over the years. The festival programmers  delved into the archives of York student productions to select a collection of films made in the past decade. Interspersed in the 76-minute program are a number of one-minute segments from The 40 Film, a specially curated collection of snippets spanning the department’s entire history.  (The 40 Film with an alumni preview downtown at the Camera Bar and a party on the Harry W. Arthurs Common at York’s Keele campus.)

“We’re very pleased to help �첥��Ƶ celebrate this milestone,” said WSFF director Eileen Arandiga. “What’s truly exciting about this program is the variety of shorts and the mature talent of these young filmmakers. There’s no denying it – �첥��Ƶ’s Film Department shines.”

“We’re delighted to cap our 40th anniversary celebrations with this retrospective at the Worldwide Short Film Fest,” said Professor Anmon Buchbinder, chair of the department. “The featured productions are an excellence representation of the remarkable work our students are doing.”

The retrospective comprises six shorts, all of which were nominees or winners at CineSiege, the department’s annual juried film showcase, in the year they were produced.

Current student Vu Van (Franco) Nguyen’s short fiction film Plants out of Sunlight (2010) makes its world premiere at WSFF. It tells the story of Mia, who works her fingers to the bone at a thankless factory job and longs for a better relationship with her son, who’s taken to staying out all night and sleeping all day.

Above: The character Mia in Vu Van (Franco) Nguyen's 2010 short fiction film Plants out of Sunlight

The WSFF retrospective is yet another feather in the cap of Hugh Gibson (BFA ‘04), who has enjoyed international festival success with his gritty drama Hogtown Blues (2004). The film portrays a Russian immigrant woman living in Toronto who tries to patch up her fractured relationship with her father, for the sake of her son. Hogtown Blues has been seen at more than 20 festivals, including Toronto, Montreal, Austin, Palm Springs, Brno and Bilbao, where it won the audience award.

Above: Vladimir Radian in a scene from Hogtown Blues

Luo Li (BFA ‘05, MFA ‘09), winner of  Toronto’s 2011 Images Festival Prize for his thesis feature Rivers and My Father, created the experimental short Fly in 2005 as an undergraduate student. The film weaves together ink, paintbrush and experimental filmmaking techniques to form an astute exploration of flight and calligraphy.

Left: A scene from the 2005 film Fly

Director Scott Boyd (BFA ‘07) heard about a death-defying world record attempt by a dangerously cool-headed magician and decided to turn it into a short film of epic proportions. Having screened at festivals across Canada and on television in the US, UK and Italy, his documentary Escape Clause (2007) receives its Toronto premiere at WSFF.

Tess Girard (BFA ‘05) created her hauntingly beautiful documentary Benediction (2005) as a homage to her recently deceased grandmother. The film has earned many accolades, including a showing at the Toronto International Film Festival and a special citation at TIFF’s Student Showcase as well as the prize for best overall production at the Canadian Student Film Festival in Montreal.

Right: A scene from the doucmentary Benediction (2005)

The School (2003), co-directed by Matthew Miller (BFA ‘03) and Ezra Krybus (BFA ’03), is a darkly comedic fable that asks: “Is it death which gives meaning to life, or is it life which gives meaning to death?” - Edgar Gibson’s elementary school class finds out the hard way. The School was the jury’s selection for outstanding achievement at CineSiege 2003 and went on to become a hit on the international festival circuit. It has screened at more than 25 fests worldwide and won numerous awards, including best Canadian short at the Atlantic Film Festival and the gold plaque for best student narrative at the Chicago International Film Festival.

Above: Students participating in a classroom experiment that involves planting beans in a scene from the dark fable The School

The �첥��Ƶ Retrospective unspools Friday, June 1at 4:15 pm at the ROM, 100 Queen's Park. The cinema is accessed by the south entrance. Tickets are available , at the WSFF box office in Cumberland Terrace, 2 Bloor St. West (entrance on Cumberland between Bay and Yonge, 10am to 6pm), or at the door one hour before the screening. Tickets are free, in person, for students with ID.

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A memorial service will be held today in the A.W. Miles Chapel at the Humphrey Funeral Home, 1403 Bayview Ave., at 11am. York has lowered the flag today in his memory.

Born in Toronto in 1929, Prof. Davidson graduated from the University of Toronto in 1952 and began work as a stagehand in live CBC television dramas. His career moved into film editing at the National Film Board (NFB) in Ottawa, where he co-founded the NFB Film Guild and helped organize a comprehensive survey of international documentary filmmaking. Later, he returned to the CBC and Toronto, where he was also active – sometimes as a programmer – in the Toronto Film Society.

During the late 1950s and early 1960s, he produced and directed children’s programs for the CBC, including “The Friendly Giant”, “Mr. Dress-Up”, “Junior Roundup”, “Maggie Muggins” and “Nursery School Time”. He also produced the after-school series “Passport to Adventure”, featuring Elwy Yost as host of serialized feature films chosen to fire the imaginations of young viewers, a precursor to Yost’s later TVO series “Magic Shadows”. The two men would team up again in 1977 when Prof. Davidson produced a season of TVO’s “Saturday Night at the Movies” and produced his own series, “Aspects of Cinema”, exploring all aspects of the art of cinema.

Prof. Davidson’s teaching career began in 1970, in the second year of York’s pioneering film program with founding chair James Beveridge. For three decades, he taught film editing, with rigorous attention to detail and meaning, as well as film history and theory, conveying a profound respect for the art of cinema. He loved the work of François Truffaut, Federico Fellini and Ingmar Bergman, but came alive when sharing the art of film dance or talking about the poetry of film.

He had a broad and eclectic interest in all films, from the silent films of Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, Lillian Gish and D.W. Griffith to the comedies of Preston Sturges and Ernst Lubitsch, from the Hollywood musical to the documentary art of Leni Riefenstahl, from Norman McLaren shorts to Fellini’s 8 1/2 and Robert Altman’s Nashville.

As a film-programming consultant, he was often invited to speak about educational television, the design, choreography and production of Hollywood musicals, the practice of musical "quoting" in Hollywood musical scores and other related topics.

In an obituary, his family described him as a gentleman and humanitarian, a man of integrity and kindness, and a gentle soul who developed many friendships.

At York, he was particularly close to York film Professor Tereza Barta and Ryerson University film instructor Laurinda Hartt-Fournier, who wrote in a note published on the funeral home website: “Doug, you were my best friend for 40 years and affected my life profoundly as a teacher, director, film editor, film admirer (much more than a film fan) and a wonderfully supportive friend. You are missed, but all the students I have taught in the past 20 years have been the recipients of your love of film and your joy in it through how I teach and what I teach.”

Prof. Davidson is predeceased by his wife Catherine and survived by his brother Ronald, stepdaughter Christine Thomson and her son Jeremy, as well as his nieces Robin Tonna (Vincent), Kelly Davidson and nephew Cameron Davidson. In latter years, longtime friend Catherine Lawson and her sons, Thomas and David, welcomed Professor Davidson into their lives.

Donations may be made to the Heart & Stroke Foundation of Ontario, 2300 Yonge St., Suite 1300, PO Box 2414, Toronto, ON, M4P 1E4 or charity of your choice.

Condolences and memories may be forwarded through .

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A catalyst for dialogue and healing is York film Professor Colleen Wagner’s Governor General’s Award-winning play . This electrifying drama was the inaugural production of Rwanda’s ISÔKO Theatre in the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide (see YFile, June 27, 2008).

Left: �����ٰ��������Jacqueline Umubyeyi, as Mejra in Colleen Wagner's The Monument. Photo by Nick Zajicek.

Translated into the local Kinyarwanda dialect and directed by , a former student in York’s Graduate Program in Theatre and the founding artistic director of ISÔKO, the play premiered in Kigali and toured throughout Rwanda. Harbourfront Centre’s presents the North American premiere of ISÔKO’s production (with English surtitles) at York Quay Centre in Toronto April 27 to May 1.

Intimately staged and accompanied by song and African drumming, The Monument tells the story of a young soldier who has been convicted of war crimes committed during a genocide. Just as he is about to be executed, a mysterious woman who is both his saviour and tormentor offers him freedom − at a price. Billed as a “profound excavation into the nature of forgiveness”, this highly physical and imagistic production paints a contemporary portrait of a country whose resilient voice continues to be a beacon of hope and reconciliation.

Shortly before The Monument opens at Harbourfront, a second play penned by Wagner – this one a very topical, made-in-the-moment riff on Canadian politics – hits another Toronto stage. Wrecking Ball 12: Are You Dying to Vote? swings into the electoral debate tonight at Toronto’s Theatre Centre – exactly one week before Canadians head to the polls.

is a fast and furious compendium of short works of political theatre. Playwrights hand over scripts to the directors and performers for rehearsal a mere week before the show, which is performed for one night only – usually to a fully-packed house. Founded in Toronto in 2004, The Wrecking Ball went national in 2008 when it was adopted in cities coast to coast.

Wagner is one of six writers contributing works “both strategically and from their hearts” to the current Toronto edition. The details of her piece have not yet been announced, but if The Wrecking Ball’s track record is any indication, it will be a part of a theatrical romp long remembered.

Showtime is 8pm. The Theatre Centre is located at 1087 Queen St. West at Dovercourt. Tickets are pay-what-you-can at the door.

Another catalyst for political dialogue is the latest work by York theatre professor and playwright Judith Rudakoff, which opened in Whitehorse on April 21. The River offers a vivid, poetic and unflinching glimpse into the intersecting lives of marginalized people in the community where it was created. Directed by Rudakoff’s colleague, Professor Michael Greyeyes, the production runs to May 1 at the Yukon Arts Centre Studio theatre.

Above: A map of Whitehorse drawn by Joseph Fish Tisiga, for the "Ashley Cycle" that inspired The River

The River was born out of Rudakoff’s ongoing -supported project Common Plants: Cross Pollinations in Hybrid Reality. In 2008, Rudakoff visited Whitehorse twice to lead her "Ashley Plays" workshop, in which participants collectively devise a cycle of short, site-specific performances that share a character named Ashley and a common theme – in this case, the theme of "home".

The material developed in those workshops was so compelling that the collaboration continued into subsequent years. Rudakoff worked with local artist Joseph Tisiga and David Skelton, artistic director of Whitehorse’s , a professional company dedicated to the development of live theatre relevant to northern audience to write the play. Nakai is producing it in partnership with the Yukon Anti-Poverty Coalition (YAPC).

The three artists drew inspiration for The River from both the extreme natural beauty of the Yukon and the ugliness that beauty can mask. Episodic and non-linear, the narrative is told by members of the largely untraceable "ghost population" of Whitehorse: a derelict vagrant, a missing high-school girl, a Tilley hat-wearing tourist, a transient worker and even an alien abductee. These disparate voices take the audience on an unbridled journey through a world of longing and belonging that is both real and imagined.

The production aims to promote conversation and action in the community. YAPC is actively inviting and offering free tickets to individuals who might never otherwise attend a production at the Yukon Arts Centre, as well as arranging a special invitational matinee performance at the local Salvation Army shelter. At the end of the run, YAPC and Nakai are co-hosting a community conversation to discuss the issues brought up in the play.

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The Everyday: Experiences, Concepts, Narratives is an upcoming Graduate Program in Humanities conference looking at the "everyday" as it relates to politics and ethics, power and knowledge, ontology and history.

Keynote speakers Professor (left) of the School of Geography at Queen Mary, University of London, and York film Professor Caitlin Fisher, Canada Research Chair in Digital Culture and director of the in the Faculty of Fine Arts, will delve into the everyday further.

The conference will take place April 14 to 16 on York’s Keele campus. Click here for the conference program and venues.

Ogborn, who won the Philip Leverhulme Prize in 2001 for his outstanding contribution to the discipline of geography, studies the "everyday" from a global and local perspective within the context of cultural geography and cultural history.

He will be talking about how spaces become "everyday" and what that means for how the world works. Drawing on the work of Michel de Certeau, among others, and on a range of historical material from diverse geographical settings from 17th-century Madras to 18th-century London and Jamaica, Ogborn will explore the making and unmaking of everyday geographies of walking, writing and talking. He will argue that the everyday has to be actively made through its geographies and that the process of that making has to be forgotten or obscured. The historical geographies of the production of everyday spaces, however, mean they can always be unmade.

Ogborn’s most recent books include Global Lives: Britain and the World, 1550-1800 (Cambridge University Press, 2008) and Indian Ink: Script and Print in the Making of the English East India Company (University of Chicago Press, 2007).

Right: Caitlin Fisher

Fisher is working to construct and theorize spatial narrative environments and build expressive software tools for artists. Her current research interests include digital archiving, lifelogging, data visualization and experimental game structures for storytelling. She is an international award-winning digital storyteller.

In addition to the keynote speeches, there will be several panel discussions with graduate students from across North America and the United Kingdom presenting their research on the issue of the "everyday", visual artists Faye Mullen and Nathan Cyprys will unveil their work and poet Arun Nedra Rodrigo will perform.

The conference is organized by two York graduate students, Justin Derry and Martin Parrot, and funded by the Faculty of Graduate Studies, the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies, the Department of Humanities, the Humanities Graduate Student Association, the Graduate Student Association and the York and Ryerson Joint Graduate Program in Communication & Culture.

For more information, visit The Everyday: Experiences, Concepts, Narratives conference website.

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The movie, which unites new research into visual perception with the practical aspects of 3D filmmaking, is part of an attempt to boost the local film economy and improve the 3D viewing experience – with less nausea, eye strain and headaches.

The computer-generated animation portions were created by Starz (which did the 3D animation for the Disney feature ). The live-action set was shot by �첥��Ƶ professor using a LiDAR device (light detection and ranging, or laser radar) to create a 3D map of the set. The information was integrated into the software with the animated images to ensure accurate placement of the birds against the backdrop and to study depth perception.

Kazimi, whose background is in documentary filmmaking, is cautious about the kind of sweeping generalizations being thrown around about 3D film language, but he believes it heralds fundamental changes in film storytelling, especially in slowing down the pace of films. "There's a lot more visual information for the viewer to absorb and you need to provide the time," he says.

His York colleague, psychologist , is studying how people see 3D, including issues of ghosting, image disparity and motion that can make the experience unsatisfying. Simple things such as screen size and even where you sit in the theatre make a big difference. By sitting at the middle, or toward the back, the viewer can enjoy the most comfortable experience. Seats on the aisles, she suggests, "should probably be discounted."

Complicating 3D experience is the issue of "vection" or the illusion of self- motion which can occur while watching 3D. For some, it may create motion sickness.

Lovebirds will get its world premiere at the Toronto International Stereoscopic 3D Conference, June 11-14 at the Toronto International Film Festival Bell Lightbox.

The 3D FLIC project is led by Professor Nell Tenhaaf; the includes filmmakers, vision scientists, psychologists and industry partners.

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The film will be screened tonight in the Nat Taylor Cinema, N102 Ross tonight from 6:30 to 9:15pm. Created by New York filmmaker Ellen Weissbrod, this documentary film pays tribute to  and her life. It also explores public responses to a recent major exhibition, held in Rome, New York City and St. Louis, devoted to her work and that of her father Orazio.

The film features an interview with Elizabeth Cohen, York professor of history, women's studies and humanities in the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies.

"Artemisia Gentileschi painted really dramatic and gutsy stuff, and has become one of the heroines of women's history," says Cohen. "As a young woman, Artemisia was raped by a colleague of her father's and there is a trial record that documents her family situation and these events. This archival material is my research area and I speak about it in the film."

But the film is more than historical, says Cohen, because it also represents in a beguiling way the strong and moving responses of modern students and museum visitors to Gentileschi's work and story.

"The film-maker Ellen Weissbrod, from New York, will be present," says Cohen. Following the film, there will be a panel discussion featuring Cohen, along with professors from the Departments of Women's Studies, Film Studies, Visual Arts and History.

A Woman Like That tracks the filmmaker's journey to understand Artemisia Gentileschi in her own times and for 21st -century viewers. It features interviews with scholars and writers who brought the painters' work to North American attention. Weissbrod also travels to Italy to talk with museum curators, art dealers and collectors of Gentileschi's work.

The screening is free and open to the public.

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