Film Categories: Animals

  • Black Bird

    Black Bird captures a community of crows living in East Vancouver – commissioned by Echo Park Film Centre North and Cineworks for their Vancouver Minute Project 2021. The project asked filmmakers to reflect on living in so-called Vancouver, BC. Brittney chose to focus on their current and past relationship with the crows in the city. Growing up in East Van they remember seeing the magic of the sky being filled with hundreds of crows every night as they made their daily migration back to Burnaby Lake. When they reflect on their experience growing up and living in East Van the…

  • The Thought That Counts

    The film follows Davis, grappling with profound grief and illness while struggling with memories of his late mother. His devoted husband attempts to uplift him with a heartfelt gift: a home to raise butterflies. As they navigate unexpected challenges in nurturing the delicate creatures (the cocoons already hatched), Davis confronts his past and finds solace in the transformative power of memories and the healing journey of letting go.

  • Salvage Archives

    Salvage Archives continues Rufelds’ research into cultural and subcultural expressions of late capitalist alienation, and the forms of collective storytelling that take shape under the shadows of unjust material systems. Told in a hybrid narrative style, mixing elements of essay film, social realism, and neo-noir, Salvage Archives oscillates between two narrative threads, counterposing a lonely online conspiracy theorist and a disembodied historian of agriculture. The two figures recount their stories in alternating chapters, perversely mirroring each other as they wade into the knotted abstractions of capitalist productive systems, logistics networks, patterns of accumulation, and systemic waste. As both narrators’ grandiose…

  • Husbandry

    Mary Imrie (1918 – 1988) and Jean Wallbridge (1912 – 1979) operated their architecture firm—the first run by women in Canada—at Six Acres, the home they built for their work and life together overlooking the North Saskatchewan River in west Edmonton. When Mary Imrie passed away, she bequeathed the records of their remarkable architectural practice and adventurous life, along with their home, to the province of Alberta. With a title borrowed from a telegram in the collection, GLAD YOU CLOSER HOME / NEW WHITE WHISKER MARY is Cait McKinney and Hazel Meyer’s immersive exhibition that playfully imagines and speculates in…

  • Hedge-Rider

    The Hedge-Rider sits at the boundary between the garden and the wild. She uses flying ointments to transcend her body and take flight during the night. The film attempts to capture themes around European witchcraft and altered states of consciousness.

  • 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,…

  • Finding Another Entrance, Trying the Same Door

    ‘Finding another entrance, trying the same door’, is an experimental animation that considers drawing, perception, and agnosticism. Abstract images are accompanied by an artist statement-like voiceover which considers these themes. This text, which is written in a personal voice, wrestles with the feeling of uncertainty and hesitation, while recognizing the limited guarantee of leaving these states.

  • Petal to the Metal

    This hand-processed 16mm film reflects on botanical animism. It is a song written for night-crawlers, compost, and shadows, inspired by human flower-lust. Water, fire, earth and air are interwoven with the garden’s creature crew. The work draws a parallel between the photographic alchemy of cinematic experiments and the photosynthetic processes of plants. Honourable mention, Top Canadian Short Jury Award, GIRAF 17 (2021).

  • Critters Chorus, Cycle 1

    Whirring and flashing in the night sky. Wild foliage on a moist forest floor, rapidly passing by. Nervous encounters at a redwood tree, gurgling chatter with turkeys at dusk. Casually coiffed horses, unpredictable flying objects and flapping rotors. Speckled skin scrabbles, covered in lush ferns. Swirling fog, dripping haze, old man’s beard, light – diffracted. Sassy badgers, strings and figures. Critters Chorus, Cycle 1 is the first part of an ongoing project, developed while delving into unfamiliar habitats. Lead by questioning the so-called “species problem”, Truttmann investigates the (im)possibilities of taxonomic categorization of living organisms from an artistic point of…

  • The Courser

    We see white stone structures and hear the sound of horses at full gallop, snickering from afar. The sound volume increases rapidly and sets the large group of lithic sculptures in motion. Heavy traffic noises eventually mix with the animal sounds and just when they are about to take over the soundscape entirely, images and sounds introduce the actual location: Shanghai, at the intersection of Yan’an Elevated Road and Inner Ring Elevated Road, two major, multi-leveled, urban freeways. Amidst the massive architectural structures and immobile horses underneath it, we may remember Eadweard Muybridge and his early moving image studies.