Internationally renowned Canadian artist Lynne Marsh presents Anna and the Tower, a 3-channel video installation with sound co-commissioned by TIFF and the Goethe-Institut Toronto that conflates documentary and performance. Filmed in an under-utilized airport outside of Berlin that was once a Soviet airbase, the work conveys both a sense of latency and expectation, and a desire to will events into being.

Anna and the Tower is filmed on location in the air traffic control tower of a refurbished airport, Magdeburg-Cochstedt (Germany), newly opened in 2010. At the time of filming there were no scheduled flights. The airport and tower await an economy to come, at some point in the near future. The work features Anna, a young air traffic controller who works in the tower and who becomes the protagonist/performer. Anna rehearses the tasks of her job as rituals – to pass the time and to evoke the coming. The tower provides the stage. The camera oscillates between Anna and the empty landscape as her monologue conjures a hallucinatory narrative choreography of flights. The work relays a sense of absence, latency and speculation as a way of describing an unsettled political landscape.

Presented at, and in collaboration with, Scrap Metal Gallery, 11 Dublin Street, Unit E. Runs daily September 4 to 14.

[Co-commissioned by the Goethe-Institut Toronto and the Toronto International Film Festival]