Film Categories: Childhood

  • Vertières I, II, III

    The Vertières battle was the last battle before Napoleon’s army withdrew from Haiti, which became the first independent nation in Latin America and the Caribbean. Botkay presents three filmic incursions into the Haitian historical, social and political process. Exploring aspects such as discipline/control, nature/tenderness and the ruin/resistance. this piece investigates the levels of domestication and enslavement resulting from the post-colonial processes that marked the history of the country. This film was selected by Nicole Brenez on the 10 best films 2015 list in Artforum.

  • Family Daycare: Through a New Lens

    This work grew organically out of the Family Daycare Education Project, a ten-month research and outreach project based at the Cabrillo College Early Childhood Education Department in Aptos, California. The tape includes extensive footage of children in family daycare situations, modelling use of home environments and good adult/child interaction. There are scenes from neighbourhood-based classes attended by providers, including one of Spanish-speaking providers in the Flats, Santa Cruz. Throughout the tape, providers speak for themselves – outlining the issues, needs and motivation. Nancy Andreasom, experienced educator and director of the project, speaks about the importance of recognizing and responding to…

  • Spermwhore

    This short film is a queer, feminist and experimental work that began in 2009 and came to fruition in the spring of 2013. Spermwhore is a queer experimental film about unwanted childlessness in a world where normative heterosexual relationships dictate who can become parents and in what way. When it comes to reproduction our merciless bodies reduce us to merely a set sex or given gender. But the longing for children is not limited to our bodies, and the possibility of pregnancy can be gifted, shared and undertaken together.

  • Poem

    An ode to my daily environment, and the presences of two beings – one newly arrived, the other recently departed. Images cycle and combine into dream-like passages that reveal the infinite potentials of sight within the finitude of everyday objects.

  • Festival of Light

    A record of illumination on the darkest night of the year, during an annual celebration held in Kensington Market, Toronto.

  • Routes

    Tree rhythms in the backyard of my parents’ house.

  • memento mori

    A meditation on (im)mortality, mediated by a lifetime’s compendium of images, memento mori is a layered time-lapse exploration of the total photographs captured over the course of the filmmaker’s life – over 120,000 in total. This all-seeing archive is blended into permutations and combinations of subjects, objects, percepts, dreams, and experiences, to form an encyclopedic index of the possibilities of sight. “A man sets out to draw the world. As the years go by, he peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, instruments, stars, horses, and individuals. A short time before he dies,…

  • Wild Currents

    A tragic mistake jolts Teddy and Joanne into limbo. Their spirits bear witness to their past usage of household appliances, as if by electric charge they might uncoil their spectral presences from home and garden.

  • Blue Guitar

    Things as they are are changed upon the blue guitar.

  • Summer 1975

    summer 1975 is an animated film based on one year in the filmmakers fractured life. Hand drawn rotoscoped figures are layered with stills and live video footage to create an open narrative based on events in his life that took place in 1975. He was 13 and this was a pivotal year for him in many ways. He discovered the magic of animation and was hooked. He made his first animated film with his best friend, they locked themselves away for the whole summer to complete it. 1975 was also the year that he had his first sexual experience, with…