Film Categories: Activism + Protest

  • Der Untermensch

    Dedicated to the memory of the Second World War’s homosexual victims. This short contemporary dance film abstractly depicts the persecution of homosexuals at the hands of the Third Reich by establishing a parallel between incarceration in the camps and the physical confinement felt when freedom is suppressed.

  • Karaoke

    The home has changed. The palm oil trees have grown in endless symmetry. The landscape rusts and the nostalgia turns. KARAOKE is a homecoming story. BETIK returns to his village to help his mother with the karaoke a few years after the death of his father. During the day, he has also taken a job with his uncle making karaoke videos. KARAOKE is a story that takes you back home yet reminds you to go back where you came from. KARAOKE is a debut feature film about home and deception in a karaoke club within a palm oil plantation in…

  • through the bushes and the trees, you’ll find me

    “through the bushes and the trees, you’ll find me” intertwines the personal and political histories of Hanlan’s Point Beach, the site of Canada’s first pride gathering in the early 1970s. A hole punch serves as a symbolic peephole, reflecting the cruising areas on the beach that invite both spectatorship and participation. By situating the tender moments of queer affection amidst the vast body of water surrounding the Toronto islands, the film celebrates and interrogates the histories and spaces of queer love and resistance. This work was made by hole punching frame by frame using a cricut machine, then manually taping…

  • Resistance Meditation

    A meditation on crip time and resistance by a chronically ill filmmaker, shot on Super 8 and (mostly) eco-processed by hand.

  • consider

    bombs like fireworks, the artifice of televised war in a soft, black sky, perforations of light in the film’s velvet for any serious reflection the sidereal consider in memory of the fallen in Gaza, the stars

  • OUT

    OUT, colour, QuickTime, Pro Res 422, stereo, 1 minute Two animated male figures are drawn together and pulled away until they fall into a pit of protesters. Then, a frightened look quickly disappears into the darkness. OUT is a one minute film that touches on the rising fear of being out during a global climate of growing hatred and pushback against LBGTQ rights and freedoms.

  • Both, Instrument & Sound

    Both, Instrument & Sound employs tension as an aesthetic strategy, to explore solidarity, collective struggle, and the transformation of these values under neoliberalism. The film follows the life of Tony over 3 years as he describes his process of political activism from the 1970s onwards, which cannot be disentangled from his friendships and his lovers. The film’s score – co-written with musicians, the film’s cast and crew – sonically explores different interpretations of tension—both in response to Tony’s narration and to the musicians’ existing approaches to tension as a musical, cinematic, scientific, and political experience. Everyone translates, performs and remixes…

  • Monument

    Beginning in ghostly abstraction and accumulating texture by texture into a droning meditative trance, Monument deepens to a visual and sonic intensity, mixing Super 8 film with video footage to create a complicated, multilayered encounter with the tension of protest and reclamation. A vivid and energetic durational experience of collective resistance and celebration. Super 8 footage of the decaying monuments of Presidents Park (Croaker, VA) are layered with video footage captured on Monument Avenue (Richmond, VA) during the Covid-19 pandemic and Black Lives Matter protests of 2020. Themes of registration and re- calibration are explored through form and content and…

  • We will talk about this after the last air raid alert stops

    This film, shot within a game simulation, focuses on the opposition between culture and nature and the possibilities of dealing with obsolete mechanisms of environmental exploitation. It’s a utopia about a post-war city that launches a recultivation program. The program is an attempt to create a new society where the aims of people do not stand in the way of the aims of other people, trees, rivers, chipmunks, mushrooms…” The game simulation was used as a platform to develop a speculative scenario in which humanity survives the challenges of the current century. Looking at the dystopias of the last century,…

  • Blood Like Water

    Shadi embarks on a secret adventure, and accidentally drags his family into a trap where they only have two choices; either collaborate with the Israeli occupation, or be shamed and humiliated by their own people.