Annette Mangaard

Annette Mangaard was born in 1956 in Vaerlose, Denmark. She and her family emigrated to Canada in 1960, and she grew up in Scarborough, Ontario. She attended the Ontario College of Art and design from 1977 to 1981, completing an honours degree in painting and printmaking. In 1981, Mangaard moved to Baker Lake, Nunavut, bringing with her a Super 8 camera and five reels of film. After a year of isolation, Mangaard returned to Toronto, determined to become a filmmaker.
Mangaard’s first forays into film were loose and intuitive Super 8 shorts, made nearly contemporaneously. Her first film, “Line Through Bath,” (1984) documented an art installation in Bath, England. “Nothing by Mouth” (1984) and “She Bit Me Seriously” (1984) followed, with the latter being screened at The Funnel, an experimental film collective where Mangaard was a member. It was at The Funnel that Mangaard began to explore 16mm filmmaking. While she enjoyed the immediacy of Super 8, there were fewer opportunities to exhibit small gauge films. Her next experimental works, “There is in power … seduction” (1985), “Her Soil is Gold” (1985), “The Tyranny of Architecture” (1987) and “The Iconography of Venus” (1987) were all made in 16mm.
Mangaard then branched out into scripted fare, with the “new wave road comedy” “Northbound Cairo” (1987), as well as the deeply personal “Let Me Wrap My Arms Around You.” (1992), for which she repurposed her footage shot in Baker Lake a decade earlier. During a residency at the Canadian Film Centre, Mangaard made the short drama “94 Arcana Drive” (1993). She then made her debut as a feature writer and director with “Fish Tale Soup” (1996), a sweetly comedic look at a couple dealing with infertility issues. She also returned to autobiographical themes with the film “Into the Night” (2006), a personal exploration of her struggle with insomnia.
Mangaard also turned her camera towards documentary subjects – in particular, artists and the process of making art. Notable works along these lines include “A Dialogue With Vision: The Art of Spring Hurlbut and Judith Schwarz” (1990), “The Many Faces of Arnaud Maggs” (2004), “General Idea: Art, Aids and the Fin de Siecle” (2007), “Kingaait: Riding Light into the World” (2010) and “Suzy Lake: Playing With Time” (2014).
Mangaard’s films and documentaries have screened all over the world. Notable festival credits include PAFID (Patagonia) in Argentina, Hot Docs and TIFF in Toronto, DOCSDF Mexico City Film Festival, Atlantic Film Festival, Halifax and Millenium, New York. Notable solo screenings include the Pacific Cinematheque in Vancouver, Canada and the Kino Arsenal Cinematheque in Berlin, West Germany. She was also honoured with a career retrospective of her film works at the Cinemateque Palais de Kino in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Alongside her filmmaking, Mangaard’s video installation work has appeared at Nuit Blanche, Toronto, The Confederation Art Gallery in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, Olympic Park in Sydney Australia, South-on Sea, Liverpool and Manchester, UK, and Broken Hill, Australia. She is the cofounder of the Images Festival, and has sat on the board of The Funnel, The Toronto Arts Council, LIFT, and the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre. In 2017, she received her MFA in in Interdisciplinary Media, Art and Design from OCADU in 2017 and was awarded the gold medal for her outstanding graduate work.

October 4, 2023

• English

Artist, Annette Mangaard. V tape. Accessed at: https://vtape.org/artist?ai=930
Annette Mangaard. About. Accessed at: https://www.annettemangaard.com/about
Annette Mangaard. Wikipedia. Accessed at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annette_Mangaard
Hoolboom, Mike. Annette Mangaard. “Funnel Interviews”. Accessed at: https://mikehoolboom.com/?p=13019
Sternberg, Barabara. “How we sit and just watch it all.” On Experimental Film, Cinema Canada. September, 1988. Pp. 66.

Created by Lindsay Grant, Assistant Media Archivist, University of Toronto Media Commons Archives