The inaugural University of Toronto Festival of the Arts kicked off Tuesday night with a lecture from respected Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan at the Isabel Bader Theatre. Despite the snowy weather, hundreds of students, faculty, donors, and community members filled the theatre for the lecture and cocktail reception afterward.

The Festival of the Arts is a tri-campus festival showcasing creativity and artistic achievement at U of T, including over 100 installations, performances, lectures, shows, and other artistic events. The festival will run 20 juried, student-submitted works over the course of three weeks, from March 3-20.

Organized by the U of T Arts Council, the Provost’s Office, and the newly-created ArtsZone Office, the fest includes work from academic departments as well as student groups.

Egoyan, the Dean’s Distinguished Visitor in Theatre, Film, Music, and Visual Arts at the Faculty of Arts and Science, spoke with the affable confidence of an accomplished artist and the thoughtfulness of a reflective scholar. His “sufficiently obscure” lecture was titled “Monitors, Minotaurs and the Close Up.”

For one hour, the audience was transported through an analog and digital journey with the monitor, the screen that mediates so much of our lives, as the starting point. Using his own films as examples, he discussed how a once immobile and secure satellite connection, with its cumbersome equipment in hotel conference rooms and board rooms, was transformed into hand held devices that provide instant communication, anywhere, becoming totally mediated and completely insecure.

This is not revolutionary information, to be sure, and some of the professors in attendance had no doubt made their scholarly careers by talking about mediation and “allatonceness.” But it was refreshing to hear a new voice within the context of the movies.

Egoyan shone brightest when speaking about the thought he puts in to his own work rather than theory because he is a man who takes theory seriously enough to play with it, but not so seriously that he discusses it incessantly.

The quality of his lecture surely made each of us jealous that we weren’t taking his class. His breadth and depth of knowledge about his art was a pleasure to hear.

Atom Egoyan, flirting with the postmodern, was a great start to a promising festival.

More information on the U of T Festival of the Arts can be found at arts.utoronto.ca.