Film Categories: art & artists

  • Saint-Rémi

    Abandoned in the debris of a mine, a dancer is revived by the celestial energy pulsating within him. Filmed in Quebec’s former asbestos mine of Saint-Rémi-de-Tingwick, this short film features the artist’s ‘Tetrahedron’ iron sculpture in which he dances. Serving as both a prison and a pedestal, this sculpture symbolises humanity’s detrimental creations that both elevate and destroy. This duality is also echoed in the magnificent yet barren lunar landscape of the mine, which has remained sterile since its closure in 1968. Despite the desolation, ‘Saint-Rémi’ is an ode to revegetation, a hope that flora, like the dancer, will resurface…

  • Bodyrebuilding

    How diversity work led to chronic pain and my journey to healing through weightlifting (Commissioned by Polygon Gallery)

  • Sex is Sex

    Sex is Sex is a new collaborative video series between Vivek Shraya and Christopher Sherman that playfully challenges assumptions about sexual roles and preferences based on appearance and gender.

  • light in my eyes

    A personal and poetic walk through light, love, and memories of a blind grandfather. Artist/filmmaker Christopher Wiersema considers his grandfather’s enigmatic and eloquent point of view while playing with his own. The film’s soundscape centers around a phone call with the artist’s grandmother, Rina Pullia, as she reflects on caregiving for her husband, Angelo, in Chicagoland.

  • our voices in reverse (portrait of mama)

    My first analog film, filmed from the roof of my mother’s home in west Texas in summer 2013. An experiment in reversing roles, and the precursor to a feature film that came several years later. Edited in camera on Super 8 black and white reversal film.

  • Jaddoland

    A visit to my mother’s home art studio in Texas prompts a deeper exploration into the meaning of home across generations and landscapes.

  • Echolocation

    The rain in Oakland, my grandmother’s home in Baghdad, my aunts’ voices in What’s App, my daughter learning to count to 10, my brother playing the darbuka, the cicadas in Texas, the walls of my studio, the search for new forms.

  • ELEMENTAL VISION or a film for the rest of my life

    “Elemental Vision or a film for the rest of my life” is ‘about’ light and time – moments captured in their passing, light events shot in various rhythmic patterns. It is about light and not particularly about the objects lit. The congruence of film’s basic properties with how we experience reality (in time/motion, through light) has been a guiding factor in my approach to filmmaking. Of course, there are people and other natural subjects filmed – incorporated -coming into view – a surprise. Intertitles mark sections, create pauses and breaks. They come from various sources suggestive of film terminology and…

  • Letter from Blackhawk Island

    From her home in Blackhawk Island WI, the poet Lorine Niedecker traded lively and impactful letters with numerous peers, most notably Louis Zukofsky and, later, Cid Corman. After a brief sojourn in New York, she lived alone in a one-room cabin for much of her adult life, walking several miles to nearby Fort Atkinson to work as a copy editor at a dairy industry newsletter until failing eyesight reduced her to menial labour. Niedecker connected to the outside world by post, and among the small shelf of books she kept for herself were several collections of letters, including those of…

  • Tarpaulins

    The point of departure for “Tarpaulins” was a colorful disturbance on the cityscape of Los Angeles: a home in the distance festooned with a giant striped tarp. These are termite fumigation tents and filmmaker Lisa Truttmann follows their story on a two-year long investigation as she hunts down the tents, the homes, the termites inside and their traces. As the film goes on, the termites soon become our allies, guiding us through Los Angeles’ neighborhoods on their own terms. Questions of life and death, profit and loss, home and un-home, macrocosm and microcosm are brought to the fore in pursuit…