Film Categories: Aging

  • Grandmothers

    A lyrical documentary that lends deep listening to, and seeks universal wisdom from, three formidable older women from diverse communities living on Prince Edward Island. “Grandmothers” explores the worlds of three women who have reached a formidable age. It gently seeks universal wisdom through their specific tales of hardship and humour. In response to these stories, three young artists (a dancer, a musician and an animator) weave their work throughout the film. “Grandmothers” demonstrates the richness that can be derived from intergenerational relationships and subtly attempts to address the lack of intergenerational spaces in popular North American culture.

  • Abandon!Abandon!

    A brief, silent investigation into ways of writing time. What do technologies ask of me?

  • Even the Sun Practices Time

    A bedtime story for the chronically aging. — In “Even the Sun Practices Time” I am exploring the creative possibilities and limitations of misunderstanding, as well as ways of communicating with the empirically absent, divine or earthly. I bring together multiple found footage sources to listen across purposes, forming a kind of speculative listening. My hope is that the film becomes a kind of third space that allows me to access a place outside of forgiveness and condemnation. Found footage gives me a collaborator. I am working with this footage not to decontextualize it, or detourn it, but to have…

  • Tell Me about SunTea

    Tell Me about SunTea (Super 8, Digital Video, Colour, Stereo Sound, 6 minutes and 47 seconds) Tell Me about SunTea builds a conversational and spatial ecosystem, weaving together the disparate spaces of the Toronto Islands and Covington, Texas. The film considers the life cycles of plants and animals, as discussed by the filmmaker’s Gram and as remembered by the filmmaker. Conversational obstacles and a failed interview attempt are re-imagined as off-road opportunities. The repeated voice over reveals changes in cadence and content that point to the fragile intimacy held in language and storytelling. “Considering different forms of mechanical and organic…

  • The Names of Things

    A bed-bound woman’s year passes as a day: her time is no longer measured by the increments of a clock but by the quality of weather outside her window. Objects emerge and merge in the gloom; the old woman dissolves and reforms. Her muteness, her glaucomas and her inactivity render things indeterminate. By naming objects, animal and phenomena we reduce and delineate them, and so separate ourselves from the world around us. Shot at ISO 409,000 the image is granulated by pixelation and noise and any discreteness an object or thing might possess is confused by the digital processes of…

  • K-SARAM I: Tale of the pig head

    Centered around the Koryo-saram community in Rostov-on-Don, Russia, the film displays a shamanistic memorial ancestral ritual „Jesa”, encompassing the collective memory of Korean diaspora, the wish of the Koryo-saram for a unification of South and North Korea, and showing the real appearance of the ghosts of migrants whose transformation to spirits was not succeeded. “Saram” means human in Korean. The title refers to the today very popular K-export- products like K-Drama, K-Pop, K-Beauty, etc. and to the name that the Soviet-Korean diaspora uses instead of the South-Korean term “Koryo-In”. Approximately 500,000 ethnic Koreans reside in the former Soviet Union. Most…

  • A Parent’s Wishlist

    A short film about upward mobility and working class aspirations, A Parent’s Wishlist focuses on something that could be found in many North American homes between the mid-twentieth and early twenty-first centuries – a set of encyclopedias. Dragged from one city to another and across the country by my Chilean father, his Encyclopedia Britannica set came to symbolise his hope for a better life for both himself, and for me.

  • A Life on the Borderlands

    This is a film about my father, who immigrated to Montreal from Chile in the early 1970s after a hard-scrabble life on the streets of Santiago as a youth. Like my mother, who immigrated from Argentina around that time, his mobile life was characterised by neither chain migration nor lasting social ties with members of his ethnic group. His story is also a story about class, politics, and complicated histories of migration and exile.

  • The Way We Are

    “The Way We Are” shares excerpts of stories from audio interviews with 4 queer Asian women living in Toronto: Katherine Chun, Wenda Li, Tamai Kobayashi, and Nancy Seto. Told in the present-tense, these stories are arranged in a way that explores the past as the present, and in doing so, immersing viewers into the real-lived experiences from a different generation. This film was inspired by the intimacy of looking through a photo album with loved ones; there is something nostalgic about the materiality of handling photographs, especially in this digital era where images are so increasingly ubiquitous. The act of…

  • ARIES

    A single window frame; a portal. As the circular nature of time begins to reveal itself, a new decade begins.