Film Categories: Capitalism + Economics

  • Toe the Line

    TOE THE LINE follows Gloria Chau, a closeted teenage hockey player. When she’s not on the ice, she’s got a guitar in her hands and a snapback on her head. Her mother Nancy, a stylish Hong Kong woman, spends sleepless nights worrying about Gloria’s failing grades. Gloria is torn between two worlds: the fun but cutthroat world of hockey where she gets to be loud and proud in her queerness, and the one at home where she’s a recluse, using music to cope with being forced into becoming someone she’s not. Underlying these tensions is a deep racial divide. She…

  • For Your Pleasure

    A young actress from Slovenia performs in front of the camera for several hours, without direction, script, or any other instruction. The only source of material that she can rely on is herself. By addressing the camera eye as a tool of desubjectivization, she questions the expectations that are applied on her by the visual regime, and refuses to identify with constructed fantasies projected on her. An intense display of affects and attitudes related to the system of categorization and precarious work, challenges the viewer as well as the filmmaker.

  • Avanti!

    “Avanti!” is inspired by Antonio Gramsci’s writings: as an idealistic young man, a romantic, a father, and a revolutionary. Throughout the work I explore themes of translation and research. What happens in the shift from detached researcher to impassioned participant? “Avanti!” considers what we lose when we reduce a person to only their thinking, when we abstract them from their lives. Image description: Blurry black-and-white close-up of a person’s face, yelling or laughing (?), with eyes closed and open mouth.

  • 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…

  • fuck

    A short solo film made in quarantine, “fuck” is part silent meditation, part protest, part magic spell for a better world.

  • HK Uprising

    A tribute to the ongoing protests in Hong Kong that are taking place three decades after the Tiananmen Square uprising. Note: This film can be displayed as a multi-channel installation with May 35.

  • Rema Nascentes (Rheme maining sources)

    A place-specific film-excavation of the Bixiga neighorhood in São Paulo. Choreography of forces that cross present time. Filmancy, clairvoyance is the vision of what is taking shape. Allegory: lobby-color, speculates. Hollow in the heart of the city, a rock. A bird ‘rappina’ lands. Novelty: Quilombo, alley, dealers: step. Vai-Vai samba school’s black and white banner. Pictograms from Benjamin’s “The Arcades project”. Progress: plugging a river while it’s possible. Commodity: Matarazzo & Metro. The real state of things, real estate: banning organic. Ground- quotation, avocados, blue taroes, water tanks, oxum: (cosmo) political reaction. Rheme maining sources: life asking for passage.

  • [Être]

    [Être] was a thrift shop and eventually underground screening space in Montreal’s Mile End district. The space featured as its main attraction objects picked-up on garbage nights and accrued over many years by proprietor-curators Alek Gruszczynski et Ewa Zbroch. To be inside [Être] was like being hermetically sealed-off with a proliferation of objects, and objects containing objects, an accumulation of things and surfaces and scents that invariably activate all the senses. Shot in the basement and on the main floor of [Être] just before it closed its doors forever, this film gives a sense of what it was like to…

  • the_other_images

    A hard drive, 2.8 terabyte leftover data from a project that was shot 10 years ago. In 2008, the author and filmmaker Iris Blauensteiner made her first short movie. Now she sifts through this waste material: outtake scenes, photographs, sound files, e-mails, script passages, discarded ideas. This data was archived and well stored, but time has taken its toll. Old data formats cannot be played anymore because they are no longer compatible with current players. The multitude of read errors and image distortions disallow a comfortable recollection of the past, the pictures and sounds are not what they used to…

  • peugeot pulmonaire

    The east of France is dying, we see a half-empty factory and a mass of workers caught between precariousness and impotence. X-rays of their calcified lungs scroll by at the rhythm of a mechanical press under which one suffocates.