Film Categories: Animals

  • Animal Bridge U-3033

    Animal bridge is an experimental nature documentary about a green bridge above motor highway. Animal Bridge U-3033 is about the parallel realities of humans and wild animals. It’s filmed during a year on a bridge above motor highway. These bridges are architecturally engrossing structures, addressed only to the nature, allowing animals to cross the highway. The built environment meets the untouched nature in this narrow strip of urban forest. The 35mm film sequences shot with an old camera create contrast with a mysterious reality captured by trail cameras.

  • Elephant Dreams

    Five storytellers take off from a physical characteristic of the elephant, much like the fable of the blind men, where each constructs a different whole from a fragment. Elephant-related images are then inserted into their stories, subjectively and associatively. “Elephant Dreams” is essentially about the action of memory and the imagination at work. Everyone makes his or her own story. “Davis plays with the power of suggestion and our knowledge of filmic language to undermine a simple relationship with story and image, and to create a collage of simple pieces that add up to a complex and allusive whole. This…

  • Notes from the Anthropocene

    Filmed in vibrant super 16mm color, and black and white film, Notes from the Anthropocene, is a sensory elegy to the dinosaur. The dinosaur icon shifts from narratives of extinction, to human exceptionalism, and power. Its materiality whether fossil or plastic toy has, through popular culture, become entrenched in the imaginary of oil extraction and fossil fuel production. Notes from the Anthropocene is a speculative iconological look at the dinosaur, delivered by an imagined museum guide who ponders our symbolic relationship to an increasing ambivalence towards the natural world. The mythic dinosaurs that emerge resist domestication and seek to transcend…

  • Livestock

    “Livestock” is a documentary study of one stage in the production of motion picture film. Most of the animals at the Warren Livestock Auction will be sold for industrial meat production. Their bodies will be slaughtered and processed, their bones prepared for rendering into gelatin that might one day suspend silver halide on a strip of acetate.

  • Controller

    A fly compresses time and captures itself on video by triggering a motion-activated surveillance webcam.

  • vulture

    “vulture” sets its sight on farm animals and their surrounding flora. Static shots and slow-moving zooms, follow the grazing animals in their minute inter-species exchanges. When left to roam together the sensibilities of these “beasts” are allowed to surface. The film was shot and processed with various means including flower/plant processing carried out as blooming occurred, from 2016-18. In some cases a salt bath was used for fixing the film which was left soaking in the dark for three days. “Vultures hover over the barn, from high, with razor sharp eyesight, and a keen sense of smell. Together, they stalk…

  • GEDE VIZYON

    GEDE VIZYON is a short, experimental documentary shot in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, as part of the 5th Ghetto Biennale. Produced in collaboration with Marcos Serafim (Brazil), Steevens Simeon (Haiti), Jean-Daniel Lafontant (Haiti), Evelyne Thelus aka Mambo Jacqueline (Haiti) and Jefferson (Zé) Kielwagen. Using a goat and two portable cameras, we captured video footage of the Port-au-Prince Grand Cemetery. Later, in response to this footage, Ougan (priest) Jean-Daniel Lafontant created the poetry that became the narration, and Mambo (priestess) Jacqueline sung the religious songs that became the soundtrack. These audio recordings happened at the house (shrine) of Ogou at Temple Narivéh, in…

  • It Matters What

    Absences and translations motivate this experimental animation in an exploration of the methods and materials of reproduction and inscription. The inquiry is set within a framework of practical and critical human relationships with other-than-human-species elucidated by the theorist Donna Haraway. A fragment from Haraway’s essay “Tentacular Thinking: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene” is reworked here as a poetic manifesto. Enigmatic found-footage calls into question human violence over animal species. Plant life is both the subject matter of the images and assists the means of photographic reproduction.  The techniques used include in-camera animation, contact prints and phytograms created by the exposure of 16mm film overlaid with plant…

  • Queer Camp Trilogy

    The Queer Camp Trilogy is a series of experimental films exploring the hidden dimensions of queer Japanese American wartime history. This trilogy, made up of Looking For Jiro (2011), Warning Shot (2016), and On the Line (2018), was inspired by first-generation Japanese Americans who were incarcerated by the US government during World War II. These subjects left subtle yet discernible traces of same-sex intimacy or gender nonconformity in the archive, despite the enormous pressure put upon Japanese Americans to accept their imprisonment quietly, prove their patriotic loyalty, and smile for Ansel Adams during their unlawful imprisonment. I approached their enigmatic…