Kiva Reardon | |
---|---|
Nationality | Canadian, Irish |
Occupation(s) | Programmer, writer, editor, and commentator |
Kiva Reardon is a Canadian film programmer, writer, editor, and commentator. [1] [2]
Reardon grew up in Toronto, and credits watching Elwy Yost's long-running Saturday Night at the Movies as her first introduction to film studies. [3]
Reardon is fluent in both English and French. [4]
Reardon graduated with a bachelor's degree in Cultural Studies from McGill University in 2010. [5] She then entered the Masters of Arts program at the University of Toronto's Cinema Studies Institute, graduating in 2013. During her Masters she interned on a film by John Greyson.
In 2013, Reardon founded cléo: a journal of film and feminism—a publication dedicated to film and film culture and informed by intersectional feminist perspectives. [6] The journal was named for the protagonist of Agnès Varda's 1962 film Cléo from 5 to 7. [7] [4] The journal published a total of 19 issues over six years. [8] In August 2019, following a loss of funding due to cuts to the Ontario Arts Council by the Doug Ford government, the editors announced that the 19th issue of cléo would be the last. [9] In December 2019, the journal published a print compendium titled the cléo reader: 2013-2019. [10]
In 2018, Reardon spoke at the BFI Southbank as part of their season dedicated to Agnès Varda. In December 2019, Reardon gave the keynote address for a film series in Sudbury that opened with Cléo from 5 to 7. [4]
Reardon has worked at a number of film festivals, including the Miami Film Festival, Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival, and the International Film Festival Rotterdam. [11] [12] [13] She was the lead programmer of Contemporary World Cinema at the Toronto International Film Festival from 2017 to 2020. [14] [15] Variety profiled Reardon during TIFF 2019, describing her efforts to curate a more inclusive selection of films. [16]
After relocating to Los Angeles in 2020, Reardon held the position of associate director of Film Programs at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures. [17] In 2022, Reardon joined Barry Jenkins, Adele Romanski and Mark Ceryak's production company, Pastel, as VP Film. [18]
She is also a programmer at the Miami Film Festival and Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival, the founding editor of cléo journal, and has previously worked at the Doha Film Institute in Qatar.
This week, TIFF's Kiva Reardon and CBC film critic Eli Glasner join host Tom Power to talk about last night's epic movie-length Game of Thrones bonanza. They also share their thoughts on Avengers: Endgame and the latest development in the streaming wars between Netflix and its competitors.
She's a Programmer at the Toronto International Film Festival and the founding editor of cléo, a journal of film and feminism. Reardon lives and breathes movies because cinema has actually shaped the course of her life. In this interview from last fall, we talk about her passion for film, what it's like working at TIFF, and whitewashing in Hollywood.
Reardon has extensive experience in film programming, writing, and digital media. She is the lead programmer of Contemporary World Cinema at the Toronto International Film Festival and programmed the film series "Radical Empathy: The Films of Agnès Varda" for the TIFF Cinematheque.
The semi-formed part turned out to be a misnomer: In the e-mail, she detailed an impressively fleshed out concept for an online film publication produced in the style of an academic journal that would create a space for women and non-binary writers to explore a wide range of films from all over the world through perspectives that most interested them.
'You're not looking hard enough,' says Kiva Reardon, programmer for TIFF's Contemporary World Cinema (CWC) section and founder of the recently shuttered film journal Cléo. She rejects Barbera's notion that programming to quotas will reduce the quality of work shown at festivals.
While curating a retrospective on Arab women filmmakers at the TIFF Cinematheque in Toronto earlier this summer, programmer Kiva Reardon considered how the foregrounding of marginalized and underrepresented cinematic voices could make an impact in 2019.