Film Categories: Canada

  • Private View

    A view out my window and worries in my head. — A PRIVATE VIEW is a site-specific collective screening series curated by John Woods and created as a part of Iris Film Collective’s IN HOUSE series. What is private space and what is public? In the subdivided landscape of Vancouver privacy can be evasive, but each of us views our home as our castle and our homes’ windows give us a unique vantage point that is ours and ours alone. Iris member John Woods gave a roll of expired colour film stock to each of the members of the collective…

  • GIRLBAND

    Life on the road. It’s not easy. 50 hours of cub tour footage (1994 & 1996) boiled down to this. Thanks to Canada Council for the Arts, Vtape, Trinity Square Video and FAG for support.

  • 581 Bloor Street West

    A chunk of Toronto’s real estate, a historical landmark in fact, as it sits, in a state of sad transition.

  • 86 SE Marine

    A chunk of Vancouver Real Estate as it sits, stuck in the no-zone. —– In 2016, Iris Film Collective presented the first Vancouver Edition of One Take Super 8. 26 artists (IFC members and invited artists) were given one role of either Black and White Kodak Tri-X 200D or Colour Reversal Agfa 200D cartridges. All editing was done “in camera” as it was shot, and the film presented just as it was filmed. No peeking before the night of the screening, it’s straight from the Lab to the Screen. Artists chose to play their film silent or provide sound for…

  • I Dream of Vancouver

    In a reality continually refracted through the lens of corporate technology, what remains of those who don’t fit into this vision of the world? I Dream of Vancouver is an experimental short that explores this question through the digital landscape of Vancouver, BC. Using hypnagogic visuals and a haunting soundscape, this work expresses the detachment from the lived experience of spaces as these spaces are subsumed by algorithms and mediated images. While focusing on Vancouver as a case study, this documentary explores issues that are relevant to the world at large, such as the link between corporate technologies and gentrification…

  • The Way We Are

    “The Way We Are” shares excerpts of stories from audio interviews with 4 queer Asian women living in Toronto: Katherine Chun, Wenda Li, Tamai Kobayashi, and Nancy Seto. Told in the present-tense, these stories are arranged in a way that explores the past as the present, and in doing so, immersing viewers into the real-lived experiences from a different generation. This film was inspired by the intimacy of looking through a photo album with loved ones; there is something nostalgic about the materiality of handling photographs, especially in this digital era where images are so increasingly ubiquitous. The act of…

  • Before You Go

    A hybrid-documentary centred around a mother and daughter and their differing relationships with Iran.

  • Qualcosa di Rosso, Qualcosa di Blu

    Qualcosa di Rosso, Qualcosa di Blu combines layers of 16mm and 35mm found footage films to create a lyrical journey that accompanies the viewer into the depths of a dream of another life.

  • 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.

  • Autoritratto

    A short piece commissioned by Antimatter Media Art, a “portrait of the artist by the artist”, first exhibited as part of Automat compilation. It consists of recycled 8mm footage of Canadian landscapes, mixed materials, ink and film cement. As an immigrant, looking for, and collecting, past images of Canada is a way of imagining a past that I don’t have in this country. The re-writing of the self is produced through the archive of others via associative montage.