Penny McCann

Expo Film (this film is my memory)

I was seven when we went to Expo.

I should remember it.

But I remember nothing.

My only memory is the drive home to Kingston.

My twin sister and I in the back of the station wagon.

Lulled to sleep by the highway darkness.

Then, red flashing lights. The car slows and my father says, “Don’t look.”

La Ronde

Gondola

I completed Expo Film (is my memory) during lockdown in May 2020. Using anonymous home movie footage bought from Ebay, I set out to recreate a non-existent memory of visiting Expo ’67 in Montreal as a child. In this short film, celluloid manipulation and sound decay techniques coalesce to transform a fabled landscape into a sublime expanse of disintegrated memory. My thanks to Ottawa sound designer Edmund Eagan for his remarkable work on this project.

Expo Film (this film is my memory)

2020/09:26 min.

Production format: 16mm, Super 8

( Best viewed at full screen )

“McCann intervenes with our sense of the familiar with her use of hand-crafted analogue filmmaking approaches … purposefully setting it back into a kind of suspension that we immediately associate with the dream state of processing memories.” – Cecilia Araneda

Penny McCann is a filmmaker based in Ottawa. Her body of work spans thirty years and encompasses both narrative and experimental films and videos. Her work has screened extensively at festivals and galleries nationally and internationally, including the Ann Arbor Film Festival (Ann Arbor, Michigan), the Hamburg Short Film Festival (Hamburg, Germany), the Canadian Film Institute (Ottawa, Ontario), and the Cinémathèque Québécoise (Montreal, Quebec).

See more of her work here: https://vimeo.com/pennymccann