The First Indigenous Female Pornographer is a selection in the final edition of the Insomniac Film Festival.Insomniac Film Festival/Supplied
Presumably, the final edition of a film festival is something to mourn, not celebrate. Yet for the organizers behind Toronto’s Insomniac Film Festival, their 13th and final year highlighting the city’s low-budget and DIY artists represents a capstone, not capitulation.
“It feels like an entirely different scene now than when we started – there are things happening every week that celebrate DIY film, and that was always the dream,” says Adam Bovoletis, whose team at Insomniac has provided a crucial spotlight to such emerging talents as Sofia Bohdanowicz and the comedy troupe TallBoyz. “That’s part of why I think it’s okay for us to take our bow as the final version of this festival. We could keep doing this forever, but there are more opportunities for the scene now.”
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Bovoletis started Insomniac in his final year of high school, when he and his friends were looking to showcase their own scrappy, no-budget work. After initially lucking into a space at the Imagine Cinemas Market Square, a subterranean multiplex near St. Lawrence Market whose manager allowed Bovoletis free run of the place after midnight, the festival hopped around venues until settling at the Paradise Theatre.
“That first year was way more successful and rewarding than we could have imagined at the time, and there seemed to be a real appetite, when we were all just 18 or 19, to do more events where we could show the work we were making,” Bovoletis says. “In the years since, we’ve tried to continue the ethos of celebrating the DIY work made by our communities and giving it a platform.”
“It was all no- and low-budget, and we didn’t know anything about the industry,” adds Bovoletis’s fellow team member Khanh Tudo. “Naturally, we all gravitated toward really playful, DIY work, as opposed to stuff with a commercial, overly polished appeal.”
After Me, The Flood, directed by Max Shoham, is a selection.Insomniac Film Festival/Supplied
Over time, that sensibility has made Insomniac one of the breeding grounds for some of the country’s most exciting, rough-around-the-edges cinema. This includes programming the early work of Tristan Wheeler (whose $10,000 comedy Toronto Apartment has generated buzzy headlines across North America), Nate Wilson (The All Golden), Ian Bawa (whose new film Strong Son will premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival this fall), festival favourite Carol Nguyen (the Canadian Screen Award-nominated doc No Crying at the Dinner Table), and Maziyar Khatam (whose forthcoming feature debut Rubberneck is set to turn heads).
“An absence that we were feeling at the time was recognizing that a lot of the awesome work that was being made by our peers was challenging the idea of what a film even is. Vlogs, skateboarding videos, TikToks – people are doing incredibly creative stuff with very little resources, and not shown in film festival settings,” Bovoletis says. “We still show more traditional films, but it’s exciting to platform anything that we find exciting and risk-taking.”
Super Fancy Induce Me, directed by Benjamin Turnbull, is in this year's festival.Insomniac Film Festival/Supplied
This includes shorts found by the Insomniac team – such as from Nara Wrigglesworth, Winnie Wang, Funké Joseph and Sebastian Decter – on filmmakers’ Vimeo pages and social-media accounts, work that isn’t officially submitted for festival consideration.
“Some of the favourite things we’ve shown are less formal and less straightforward that speaks to the filmmaker’s essence,” says Tudo. “The DIY scene has also changed a lot in presentation over the years, and that comes with this kind of filmmaking becoming more accessible, and people getting exposed to that.”
Indeed, as Insomniac has grown, so, too, have screening series that have embraced a similar kind of on-the-fringe energy, including Sewer Fest and Bleeding Edge – programs that have used space at rep cinemas and microcinemas across the city to provide exposure to filmmakers who are either not yet established for the likes of TIFF or those who work in opposition to the mainstream.
“There is a gap in film festivals for people who are working in the DIY space that aren’t quote-unquote student film festivals. There’s more breadth of the type of work once you get beyond the student space,” says Wrigglesworth. “It’s rougher, it’s more risky. The end goal doesn’t have to be making it in Hollywood.”
Naturally, organizing a festival committed to low- or no-budget film isn’t exactly a money-making endeavour. Since 2018, Insomniac has operated on a modest series of grants from the Toronto Arts Council, and everyone on the team balances the festival work with full-time jobs – some working in the film industry (Bovoletis does programming work for TIFF, Wrigglesworth for Reel Asian International Film Festival), some outside of it. And in keeping with the films’ DIY spirit, the team members handle every aspect of the festival from programming to merchandise.
“This is something that has mattered so much to us since we were 18, but we want to give it the full attention that it deserves. Right now, we’re able to do it. But it feels like it’s at a crescent point where I’m not sure we could do that next year,” Bovoletis says. “We’d rather end it when it’s still fun and exciting and go out having good memories of it versus going on three years too long and thinking, man, we should have ended that a while ago.”
The final edition of the Insomniac Film Festival runs Aug. 7, 8 p.m., at the Paradise Theatre in Toronto (insomniacfestival.com).
Editor’s note: Due to incorrect information provided with the supplied photo, a caption previously misidentified the director of Super Fancy Induce Me as Benjamin Spurlock, the character he portrays in the film. The director is Benjamin Turnbull.