Film Categories: Anthropology

  • Field Trip

    “Field Trip” is a travel diary on the American social landscape. The images consist of visual research for future film projects and were accumulated during my many location scouting trips to the United States between 1980 and 1995. Over time, I have come to regard this photographic archive as a collection of works of historical and personal value. Over the years, I began to rework the photographs. The more I handled and touched them, the less I thought of them as photographs and the more I saw them as something that could be hand-shaped, altered, transformed and re-imagined. With three…

  • La Montagne

    Repeated gesture of panoramic representation becomes abstraction. This film takes place on the Kondiaronk Belvedere where people come to see the Montreal skyline and its surrounding landscape.

  • Originate and Recompile

    In 1962 Ernesto De Martino travelled to the South of Italy for his ethnographic research and shot “La Taranta”. A study around women who were poisoned by a Trantula bite while harvesting in the fields. The remedy against the deadly poison was a folk dance called Taranta. The women danced the poison out of their bodies with the help of local musicians and priests. Studies around this phenomenon have highlighted that, in the majority of cases, these women were suffering severe mental illness and hysteria due to sexual abuse and poverty. In present-day Italy a similar dynamic has resurfaced, uncovering…

  • The Eyes of Summer

    In a small and remote hamlet in Southern Sri Lanka, a little girl develops a curious friendship with a spirit who lives in an abandoned house. This film was shot in my mother’s village in Southern Sri Lanka—shortly after the civil war in 2010. Collaboratively developed with members of my family there, a narrative was improvised around an investigation into my mother’s interactions with spirits in the community during her childhood. Landing somewhere between horror fiction and “spectral” ethnography, the film describes a population reeling from devastations of the past, where distinctions between the living and the dead are thinning.

  • Imitation of Life

    Conceptually informed by Trinh T. Minh-ha’s seminal film “Reassemblage,” this short piece describes an impressionistic encounter with a woman seen from a great distance, who shields her face from a curious telescopic lens whose gaze is confused by an unknown force.

  • VIA KARELIA

    Tracing back a lost identity, hidden in the forests of an abandoned war zone. How does a trauma get carried on from a generation to another and is there a way to stop the cycle? The filmmaker tries to understand how to heal from the pressures of the past by searching for their grandmother’s childhood home. Taking the journey with their parents, they find themselves in a village located in the old Karelia, now a part of Russia.

  • Atmospheric Pressure

    As cows are milked on a British dairy farm a cataclysmic storm builds on the horizon. A mysterious meteorologist investigates the bizarre weather event and follows his equipment to the farm. But in the face of such contingency (the driving rain and restive animal life) can his research yield any results?

  • Green and Red, But Terracotta Red

    We are looking through the mirror of time, into distorted memories, while several narrators tell us about the most vivid colours in their dreams. The film consists of a collage of 16mm found footage that I further processed and decayed using a gentle combination of bleaching techniques. This process allowed me to partially lift the emulsion from the film base and re-shift it and re-position it by hand. Faces are warped, homes collapse, memories fade and blur.

  • Toad, Leaf, Grass, Rock

    A 16mm hybrid visual poem, at the crossroad between intertextuality and documentary. This film “plays” with images in an enigmatic way. Weaving, in the words of Eugenio Montale, a disappearing and deserted suburban landscape into the fabric of images, sounds, and textures of two far away lovers yearning for each other.

  • 04/19/1968

    Layers of history merge with layers of media in this hybrid experimental film. An autobiographical ode to the filmmaker’s family and what’s left of their memories. A remediation collage of 16mm film, old 35mm Kodak slides and a digital computer screen. Filmed with an old DSLR camera at a specific angle in order to capture the ethereal reflections.