Images Festival of Independent Film and Video. (Festival Wraps).

Morose existential cowboys, ruminations on fleeting love, fast chopsticks that kill, kill, kill, and a giant slug named Laura hitchhiking to Winnipeg - it looks like Canadian filmmakers have more up their creative sleeves than pallid adventures of an all-male curling team. Now in its 15th year, the Images Festival of Independent Film and Video brought together another full plate of abstract video art, personal diaries and homemade porn from around the world to Toronto in April. The festival also dedicated a retrospective to Richard Fung, a Toronto video artist, theorist and activist, which included his early important works as well as an excerpt from his latest film, National Sex.

The festival opened with its usual bang, featuring a strong program of short films, which included the sumptuous Passage by Iranian-born, New York-based photographer/installation artist/filmmaker Shirin Neshat, and the Oscar-nominated Copy Shop by Austrian filmmaker Virgil Widrich. Two Canadian films also formed part of this selection: Julie--Christine Fortier's Line Up and Steven Woloshen's Babble on Palms. The babble in question is the type of language originated by NFB animator Norman McLaren -- colourful patterns of hand--drawn dots and lines dancing across an unidentified hand partially blocking the view of landscape shots in the background.

Other noteworthy Canadian films were spread out over the festival's 25 appetizing programs. They ranged in theme and genre, from the intimate and personal -- Sarah Abbott's and Jeremy Drummond's quietly devastating My Heart the Prophet -- to the thoughtful and philosophical, Daniel Cockburn's clever and witty The Other Shoe. Libby Hague's Our Town tells the story of six-year--old Molly who "only wants a prince, a magic carpet and a happy ending." Using watercolour drawings of children skipping rope and riding their bikes against the scrolling background of a suburban development complex, Our Town initially seems like a playful caricature of childhood innocence. But underneath the veneer of suburban complacency lies an unforeseen suicide that rattles the normalcy of a family and the peacefulness of an entire neighbourhood. With the advent of such a tragedy, Molly doesn't get her happy ending after all.

With the number of touching personal stories and thought-provoking anecdotes featured at the festival, Images wouldn't truly be an experimental film festival without including a few films that toss away the whole notion of narrative. In Static Discharge for Bleeding Eyes, Jowita Kepa slices, inverts, flashes and reverses the negative image of an unidentified man with a minimalist soundtrack of white noise pulsating in the background. A fascinating example of image and sound manipulation, Static proves that sometimes telling a story without actually telling any story can have a major dramatic effect. At the other end of the abstract spectrum, Ian Toews went for the more au naturel approach in the self-explanatory Japan: Kesei Line Single Take. By simply allowing his camera to roll from the window of a fast-moving commuter train, Toews captures the Tokyo landscape whizzing by at high speed. The result is a spectacular display of a "living" abstract canvas.

The equally Japanese--themed Sand was by far one of the oddest Canadian films programmed at Images this year. Using black-and-white animated drawings and voice--overs speaking in Japanese (with English subtitles), Percy Fuentes strings up vignettes of fragmented stories, ranging from childhood memories of listening to records while sitting on the roof to arguments about the death of punk and how Blowout Comb was the slickest hip-hop album of the 1990s. In terms of narrative, Sand may not make a lot of sense, and yet it strangely stands out as one of the most intriguing and creative Canadian films featured in the festival.

The festival wrapped up with the Queerest of the Queer program, which included four noteworthy Canadian films. Les Amants by Nessa Palmer and Chang Wan Wee is a short but sexy film about two lovers taking the French kiss to the next erotic level. In Mark Costner's There Is Absence, There is Lack, a lone modern-day cowboy walks all over town holding a window frame in search of its perfect fit in an imperfect world. Following closely in the footsteps of Richard Fung, but with his own tongue-in--cheek style, Vancouver-based filmmaker Wayne Yung has always been one not to shy away from addressing head--on issues of queer sexuality and Asian identity. In his latest, Chopsticks, Bloody Chopsticks, Yung works in co--operation with gore filmmaker Shawn Durr to create a split--screen diary of an Asian serial killer getting back at his white ex--boyfriends. High in camp and fun, Chopsticks nonetheless carries serious undertones of queer Asian politics.

Those who tenaciously stuck till the tail end of the festival were regaled by an unexpected treat. Scott Treleaven's The Salivation Army may have been the last film programmed at the festival, but it certainly stood out as one of the boldest and well-crafted films in terms of the Canadian selection. Narrated by Treleaven himself, the film is based on fairly recent real-life events. The Salivation Army, as the filmmaker explains, is a group of friends, a queer cult, a pack of wolves and sex-crazed hyenas. It starts with three friends with deeply personal agendas to condemn fascism, elitism, classicism, racism and sexism. Based on their common ethos, the group members start a zine, sharing their beliefs and views of the world. While it was meant to be a half-joke, some people begin to take the Salivation Army too seriously. Letters of support from all over the world start pouring in. Then, a young boy from New York contacts the group, begging to do anything to be initiated into the gang. The coup de grace comes about when an unlabelled videotape arrives from San Francisco, containing footage of a boy tied up and lying unconscious on the ground. Had he been raped? Was this a joke or the consequences of an initiation rite? More importantly, should the tape be handed to the police, and if so, will the Salivation Army be held accountable? Creepy, disturbing, honest and ultimately poignant, The Salivation Army is crafted with homemade porn, re-enacted footage, as well as the clip of the video sent from San Francisco, Clearly influenced by Derek Jarman and Kenneth Anger, Toronto--based Treleaven has finally emerged as a strong talent to keep a close eye on.