Film Categories: Capitalism + Economics

  • 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…

  • Una Sola Sangre

    “I have two homelands, but one blood,” says Silvia Galdes in Una Sola Sangre, the latest film by the Haitian-born, Toronto-based filmmaker Esery Mondesir. Silvia, along with her siblings Silverio and Estella, is a first-generation Haitian-Cuban, the daughter of Sylvain Galdes, one of an estimated 500.000 Haitians who migrated to Cuba for work in the early 20th century. Despite not seeing their father’s homeland until their sixth decades (and after the shooting of the film), the Galdes family and their social position in Cuba has long been marked by their Haitianness – an identity they and their children negotiate in…

  • Sammy

    Toronto, July 27, 2013, shortly after midnight. Sammy Yatim is standing inside an empty streetcar, a small knife in his right hand. A Toronto Police officer will shoot him dead. From a mixture of gunpowder, blood and acrimony: the portrait of a boy who didn’t have to die.

  • On A Clear Day You Can See The Revolution From Here

    An expansive journey through the Kazakh steppe, On A Clear Day You Can See the Revolution From Here excavates layers of myth, history and geology to reveal the shifting fault lines between a government, its people and their land. The film brings into focus Kazakhstan’s search for a post-Soviet identity and a state-sponsored programme of cultural production that on the one hand connects back to the ancient folklore and belief systems of the Silk Road, while on the other, seeks to embrace the values of Western capitalism. Taking an experimental documentary form, On A Clear Day provides a meditative faux…

  • War Game

    In an imagined battle between the United States and the fictional Latin American country of Cubuchilia, an American soldier has control over water resources and news media on both sides of the war. This depressed white soldier profits monetarily by the continuation of the war, and therefore ensures the battle endures through his power over the water and news. Inadvertently, he causes all the soldiers on both sides to perish, and thus the war ends. He then, through his media control, presents himself as the hero of the conflict and the savior of the United States.

  • Reabertura

    A city reopens during a pandemic. Filmed in Coimbra during the COVID-19 pandemic, Reabertura captures the city in the process of reopening, as businesses sanitize and reorganize in preparation for the new “normal”, pointing to an unsettlingly capitalistic adaptation of reality.

  • Prairie Grizzly’s Peneplain

    “Prairie Grizzly’s Peneplain” is a meditation on various natural and manufactured landscapes in southern Saskatchewan. This region is part of an ancient Precambrian seabed rebounding from the last Ice Age which once had a dynamic range of wildlife, plants, and wetlands supporting various ancient cultures that flourished here for millennia. Up until the late 1800‘s the Prairie Grizzly thrived on the Canadian Prairies. The bears that managed to migrate further west to the Rocky Mountains faced a difficult transition, although they have managed to survive in their new homes. Along with the plains buffalo, the have become a presence in…

  • 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.

  • A Letter from Huami

    In 2069, a few rolls of films were found in a regeneration center occasionally. Then scientists extracted the genes from the hair which were left on the films to give a cat -Huami a new life. With human’s consciousness and the memories which belongs to the past time, Huami wrote a letter to her owner in 2019…

  • Xam

    Xam is a sci-fi exploration on the future of surveillance and body hacking. While in the London subway, an unsuspecting man opens a strange text, rendering him unconscious and dragging him through a wormhole. He awakes, lost, on the train tracks in Kiev, Ukraine, unable to communicate with friends or family. With the help of the hacker community in Kiev, and then Paris, the man harnesses alternative virtual transmissions in an attempt to find his way home. Xam is told through an intimate, first-person frame and video collage to emphasize the increasing integration of human and technology. The story is…