FILM | Images Festival
For 23 years, the Images Festival has been celebrating the best of independent film and video. Now the largest festival of its kind in North America, the festival has expanded to include all kinds of mediums, and this year's program includes on-screen, off-screen, and live performances. Full of wonderfully interesting works that will never get within a mile of a multiplex, the schedule begins tonight with John Greyson's Covered, a narrative capturing the controversial Queer Sarajevo Festival, and Kamal Aljafari's Port of Memory, a feature about the Palestinian city of Jaffa. With 145 artists presenting work at 25 venues over the course of 10 days, there's plenty here to delight the eye and stimulate the mind, including the premiere of Erie, Kevin Jerome Everon's film about the Recession-afflicted Michigan working class and an installation at MOCCA by Emma Hart and Benedict Drew that turns projection equipment into musical instruments.
Various venues and times, check program for full details, Memberships starting at $45

THEATRE | Performance Spring Festival at Factory Theatre
Factory Theatre's Spring Performance Festival launches today, presenting three groundbreaking theatre and dance works from across the country. The fest kicks off with a new contemporary dance piece called this time by Heidi Strauss and ends with Calgary-based dance theatre icon Denise Clarke's A Fabulous Disaster. The highlight of this year's program is the Vancouver Playwright Theatre's Where the Blood Mixes, a drama which originally played in Toronto for a brief run during 2008's LuminaTO festival. The play confronts the painful legacy of the residential school system through the eyes of a survivor and his estranged daughter, and runs from April 7 to 18. Concurrent with the three productions is a development festival called CrossCurrents which presents a program of new, raw works by a diverse group of Canadian playwrights.
Factory Theatre, 125 Bathurst St. -- check the schedule for complete program.

DANCE | At Once Twice
The Toronto Dance Theatre's production of At Once is so nice that every night they do it twice. The newest solo by iconic postmodern choreographer Deborah Hay has been adapted by dancers Christopher House and Joe Moran, and the result is two entirely different performances which reflect the contrasting backgrounds of both dancers and provide audiences with two separate perspectives on one of the most influential choreographers in the world of dance today. As with any postmodern dance performance, At Once Twice asks a lot of its audience, but is potentially eye-opening in return. Runs til Saturday.
Winchester Street Theatre, 80 Winchester St., $22, 8 pm

GALLERY | Mourning Light
American photographer Jane Fulton Alt has always been interested in universal themes of humanity. While you might think that's led her to take feel-good photographs, it turns out the things we have in common aren't always so uplifting to explore. For her latest solo exhibition at Parkdale's Gallery DK, Fulton Alt visited some of the most unsettling places on Earth: European concentration camps and West African slave forts. The resulting photographs capture some of the darkest chapters in human history, allowing for only the slimmest sliver of light through the cracks. Runs til April 25.
Gallery DK, 1332 Queen St. West, Opening reception tonight 7 pm - 10 pm, Gallery hours Thursday to Sunday, 12 pm - 5 pm

FILM | Denys Arcand's Days of Darkness
The National Film Board Meditheque's French-language Ciné-Jeudi program presents 2007's L'Âge des Ténèbres tonight (that's Days of Darkness to all you unilinguists). Directed by Oscar-winning Quebecois auteur Denys Arcand, the film represented Canada at the 2007 Cannes film festival and is the third instalment in the trilogy that began with the Decline of the American Empire and the superb Barbarian Invasions. Although it was nominated for a best picture Genie in 2008, the film wasn't as well-received by most critics as the first two instalments. Still, it's must-see for anyone who loved the originals and wants to know the ultimate fate of Arcand's memorable characters.
National Film Board Mediatheque, 150 John St., $6, 7:30 pm

GALLERY | Eternal Inca by Titka Seddighi
The great monuments of the world have always captured the imagination of historians and tourists alike, but for Titka Seddighi they have become a passion. An architect by training and an artist by nature, Seddighi uses photography to connect us with the past by capturing monumental buildings of the world's cultures. Her new exhibition at Queen Gallery transports us to the heights of the stunning sacred valley of the Incas in the Andes of Peru, where ancient architecture merges perfectly with the landscape's natural beauty. Seddighi's amazing images of the Incan temple complexes will be on display until April 13.
Queen Gallery, 382 Queen St. East, Opening reception tonight 6 pm - 10 pm, Gallery Hours Tuesday to Friday 11 am - 6 pm, Saturday 1 pm - 5pm

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Photo: "Raspberries" by Christie Photography, member of the blogTO Flickr Pool.