Film Categories: America

  • Empire State

    As an Elder goes about preparing wild onions and corn, the outside world infiltrates through the TV: the fall of the Twin Towers, the hit on Baghdad, and the first death of a Native American soldier overseas. A subtly poignant film that simply told gives strength to the old man and to those who bear witness. Image description: An Indigenous Elder’s hands hold a paring knife, cutting the roots off a wild green onion stalk. More green onions lie on a cloth below.

  • aw • rah • nyoosh

    A documentary filmmaker attempts to imagine, along with his father, his grandmother’s experience at a labor camp during the holocaust. As they get drawn into a world of the grandmother’s romance, they begin to lose control of their imaginations. “The son installs the camera, the father stands on the sofa. They are preparing to begin an intergenerational dialogue based on the newspaper that their mother and grandmother, Sari, held in the 40s, during his deportation. aw • rah • nyoosh [aranyos] , from Ben Neufeld, takes time to set up; the viewer takes time to understand the contract that the…

  • Loathing

    The film depicts a society controlled by an autonomous system. While plebs are unhappy with their Designer overlords, a smart assistant takes part in a Luddite conspiracy against them. The conspiracy fails. The assistant recounts the events of the revolution in a court of law

  • Catalyst

    Being natural born pattern seekers, we are forever looking for this or that clue to help explain what otherwise might appear unfathomable. Fundamentally Catalyst represents a type of diary without dates, of memories reconstructed to formulate my story. A story that takes place in time and space, shaped by the earth and sky Merging super 8 mm footage that I filmed many years ago with some of my more recent DSLR/HDV tape footage, Catalyst investigates how each medium shaped my story as well as the gaps in time when each sequence was filmed. Filmed on location by Kent Tate: Toronto,…

  • Looking for Jiro

    “Looking for Jiro” explores the hidden dimensions of same sex intimacy for Japanese Americans incarcerated by the US government during World War II. This experimental performance video is inspired by Jiro Onuma, a gay Issei (immigrant) who was imprisoned at Topaz concentration camp in central Utah. He worked in the prison mess hall and was also an avid fan of homoerotic male physique magazines. How did this dandy gay bachelor from San Francisco survive the isolation, humiliation, and homophobia of imprisonment? This queer musical mash-up video features drag king performance, US propaganda footage, muscle building, and homoerotic bread making. This…

  • Sex, Politics & Sticky Rice

    Protests, potlucks, and three-ways are just the “tip of the rice bowl” for five Asian American lesbians recounting their adventures in sex, love, and queer activism. They were among the first generation of out Asian Pacific Islander queer activists in the San Francisco Bay Area. While Crystal Jang falls hard for her PE teacher, Gisele Pohan’s immigrant father dares her to join the 1979 Gay & Lesbian March on Washington. Helen Zia and Lia Shigemura keep a “chart” of the various hook ups and break ups. Zee Wong discovers the joys of lesbian sex in her first girl-on-girl menage a…

  • Warning Shot

    One death. Three versions of the crime. James H. Wakasa, a 63-year-old Japanese American bachelor, was shot to death by military police at Topaz concentration camp during World War II. Was it justifiable homicide, an accidental fatality, or second-degree murder? The press said he was trying to escape, the shooter claimed it was a warning shot, the case file suggests he was killed while walking a dog. This experimental film essay uses the “Rashomon effect” to juxtapose the conflicting accounts detailing the circumstances and cause of Wakasa’s untimely death. Part of the Queer Camp Trilogy.

  • Semiotics of Sab

    This experimental film essay explores the poetics of identity through an oblique portrait of gay Japanese American actor Sab Shimono. For more than five decades, Shimono has performed on stage and screen in over 150 roles as warlords, bus boys, and businessmen. Shimono asks, “How is it that we know who we are?” Recalling early structuralist works by Hollis Frampton and Martha Rosler, Semiotics of Sab displays the grammatology of queer Asian American masculinity through conflicting lexicons of race, representation, and selfhood.

  • Traje de Luces | Suit of Lights

    Traje de Luces | Suit of Lights is an expressive documentary composed with footage of a Spanish bullfight, that iconic imagery of highly decorated masculinity and violence masked as nationalism. The footage was drawn from Jacques Madvo Collection material filmed in Spain between 1976-1978. Madvo shot this footage at a time when Spain began its difficult and flawed transition to democracy in the years following dictator Francisco Franco’s death in 1975. The film consists of 16mm footage that has been decayed in soil, contact-printed and laboriously re-photographed and these abstractions of light and darkness ground the inquiry surrounding why citizens…

  • Soy un ser cuyas raíces // I am a being whose roots

    Soy un ser cuyas raíces // I am a being whose roots reworks Jacques Madvo’s Countries & People: Venezuela to explore labour and migration. Taking the final words of the film’s voice-over as a starting point, Soy un ser cuyas raíces // I am a being whose roots pairs Madvo’s film footage with a text-based conversation with young Venezuelan literature scholar and language teacher Angel Said Dominguez Pinto. Dominguez Pinto relocated to Panama in 2014 to make a living teaching English, Spanish & German in Panama City after Venezuela’s economic collapse. Over e-mail, we co-authored a conversational text, exploring migration,…