OCT 28 + NOV 2

A singular figure in the Canadian cinema, the Ottawa filmmaker Frank Cole (b. 1954) was murdered in 2000 by bandits in the Sahara desert, the locale of some his most poignant, poetic and personal film work. The sad and shocking circumstances of Cole’s demise, still shrouded in some mystery, were also strangely commensurate with his creative output: Cole’s obsessive, visionary films — two astonishing feature-length pieces and two award-winning shorts — reveal a man who, in both his life and in his art, was in constant confrontation with death, a man ever in pursuit of the limits and extremes of his mortality. Cole’s solo crossing of the Sahara in 1990 — the subject of his film Life Without Death (2000) — earned him a place in the Guinness Book of World Records. His defiance of mortality and mortification extended even to his final wishes, which were honoured by his family: to have his remains cryonically preserved.

This retrospective, compromised of Cole’s four films and a documentary about his life and death, was organized in conjunction with the recent publication of Life Without Death: The Cinema of Frank Cole, a new book about the filmmaker edited by Mike Hoolboom and Tom McSorley. Tom McSorley will be our guest on October 28.

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Introduction by Tom McSorley - Thursday, October 28

Tom McSorley, executive director of the Canadian Film Institute in Ottawa and co-editor (with Mike Hoolboom) of Life Without Death: The Cinema of Frank Cole (Coach House Books, 2009) will provide an introduction to the remarkable life and work of Frank Cole.