We are named for the second sequence in John Hofsess’s Palace of Pleasure. What does Black Zero mean to us? It is the solid black frame that marks the zero-point of a film’s countdown leader; it is the dark acetate of a film reel as seen in profile; it is a void and an absolute fill, nothing and everything, the darkness of the movie house magnified to infinity. It is the circle at the centre of each of our discs.

In 1968, Jonas Mekas wrote that the Canadian underground film had “a finer vibration, a finer density, a finer matter.” It was bursting with an extraordinary diversity of forms, and its evolution in years since has prized photographic self-reflexivity, the landscape, the diary. Black Zero seeks to celebrate this cinema in both its dominant forms and its strange detours.