Wavelengths 2009 concludes on a ruminative note, with art and experience partaking in time’s inevitable passage.

Ute Aurand’s Snowing Chestnut Blossoms (Germany) is a gentle, generous and unsparing portrait of the filmmaker’s parents, whose passing is marked by remembrance and the loving recording of them.

The idea of the “life portrait” is at the core of the photographic and film work of Friedl vom Gröller (Kubelka). Polterabend (Austria) is an atypical portrait of female aging, made just prior to the artist’s wedding. Six older women of various ages are filmed, first in static tableau, then in a panning camera individualizing each face in a series of uncontrolled and disarming reciprocal gazes.

Passage Briare (Austria) is a tiny picaresque set in Paris chronicling Kubelka’s coy encounter with an unnamed man.

Jim Jennings’s Greenpoint (USA) is a rapturous and observant portrait of Greenpoint, Brooklyn, that pays tribute to a working-class neighbourhood on the verge of gentrification with a boogie-woogie collage of hot colours, pealing posters, graffiti art and neon signs.

Coleen Fitzgibbon’s 1974 FM/TRCS (USA), recently preserved by filmmaker Sandra Gibson, is a masterful work of abstraction that explores the textures of the medium and dissolution of imagery to a woman’s undressing.

After working on many Wavelengths films over the years at Niagara Custom Lab in Toronto, Sebastjan Henrickson presents Flash Camera Movie (Canada). For one year (2002–03), Henrickson stole moments from his hectic days to ritualistically record his surroundings with disposable flash cameras one frame at a time. Allowing for repose and reflection, the resulting imagery reveals the paradoxical precious and banal moments in life.