The Tree of Cinema

About the Project

The Tree of Cinema is a monumental sculptural installation that translates the history and collective experience of cinema into a physical structure.

Created exclusively for the Toronto International Film Festival, the work takes the archetypal form of a tree and reconstructs it through the material and visual language of filmmaking.

At its centre is a fabricated steel trunk — a reference to the structural, industrial, and technological foundations that make cinema possible. From this framework emerges an expansive canopy of flowing film strips, transforming a familiar cinematic material into an architectural and sculptural form.

The strips carry two interconnected histories. Iconic moments from world cinema are woven together with photographs of audiences watching, gathering, laughing, reflecting, and experiencing films together.

This juxtaposition is fundamental to the work.

Cinema is usually represented through its visible creators and cultural landmarks: films, directors, actors, and images. The Tree of Cinema introduces another essential component into that history — the viewer.

Without an audience, cinema remains incomplete.

The installation therefore becomes both object and metaphor: a tree whose structure represents the systems that support filmmaking, whose film-strip canopy carries its cultural memory, and whose continued life depends upon the people gathered beneath it.

For Yury Goncharov, the project extends his practice of combining sculpture, engineering, fabrication, and conceptual thinking at an architectural scale. Material and structure are used not simply to construct an object, but to give physical form to an otherwise intangible idea — the relationship between cinema, memory, and collective experience.

Installed in the public space of TIFF’s Festival Street, The Tree of Cinema invites visitors to move around and beneath the sculpture rather than encounter it from a fixed viewpoint. In doing so, the audience becomes physically integrated into the work itself.

Like a tree, cinema continues to grow through what it carries forward.

Its structure holds the images. Its audience keeps them alive.