Film Categories: Class-struggle

  • Dear Friend, Where Have You Gone?

    For Jayden Martin, art is more than just a hobby. It’s his escape, his passion, and his lifeline. But as an artist in the small, rural community of Englehart, Ontario, Jayden’s dreams of making it big seem almost impossible. Despite growing up with divorced parents and struggling with addiction, mental health, and suicide, he remains determined to succeed. “Dear Friend, Where Have You Gone?” offers a rare glimpse into Jayden’s world as he navigates the challenges of small-town life and grapples with his own inner demons. This powerful documentary is an inspiring reminder of human resilience and the transformative power…

  • Karaoke

    The home has changed. The palm oil trees have grown in endless symmetry. The landscape rusts and the nostalgia turns. KARAOKE is a homecoming story. BETIK returns to his village to help his mother with the karaoke a few years after the death of his father. During the day, he has also taken a job with his uncle making karaoke videos. KARAOKE is a story that takes you back home yet reminds you to go back where you came from. KARAOKE is a debut feature film about home and deception in a karaoke club within a palm oil plantation in…

  • Cha ni chinu chi’in ñu’un / Construida de tierra / Built of Earth

    Cha ni chinu chi’in ñu’un / Construida de tierra / Built of Earth is an experimental documentary project consisting of a short film, a publication, and a collaborative installation that explores the immense and ancient family home at the centre of Jamiltepec, Oaxaca, Mexico. The cavernous adobe house is in the process of being restored after a devastating earthquake that saw a portion of its roof collapse in February 2018. The short film follows the restoration process, with its focus on traditional building materials and techniques, creative reuse, and local artisanal production. In doing so, it explores the origins of…

  • Entre la langue et l’océan

    A psycho-sexual poetic politico historico and reflective film document about the Canadian identity and the failed revolution of 1837 – 1838. To understand the disease’s origins is not equivalent to finding an effective therapy, but it is undoubtedly a crucial prerequisite. Entre la Langue et L’Océan. Surréaliste, radical, esthètiquement riche et techniquement ambitieux, ceci est un film qui résiste toute classification. A man tries to invent a liberated state and ends up in a penal colony. After awhile he hesitates to remember the cause of his incarceration. He only remembers what he left behind not what he was hoping to…

  • Wisemen, God, and Wednesday

    Within three diverse pairs of eyes are born three souls that converge. Samwise and Stevie grew up homeless in BC and Nova Scotia. Ianos is a gender-queer Greek. Kwaku is a single father who came from extreme poverty and famine. Featuring a juxtaposition of sound and imagery, “Wisemen, God, and Wednesday” is a sketch of these characters’ intimate commentaries on life as they see it.

  • AfterMath

    AfterMath describes a time when there was a wide spread belief of some grand global plan when in reality there was no plan of any kind, only competing interests constantly jockeying for a dominate position. Sequences in order of appearance: Soviet computer scientist just prior to the dissolution of the USSR – Another Soviet computer scientist just prior to the dissolution of the USSR – Semi-Trailer Truck with Trans Mountain gas line pipes resting at a Travel Center in BC – The Poplar River coal fired electrical power plant during a period of record rainfall in Saskatchewan – Abandoned car…

  • Feet in Water, Head on Fire

    Along the San Andreas fault line in Southern California, Indigenous palm trees and date palms imported from West Asia flourish. The people who tend to them reflect a landscape of frictions and affections shaped over generations by agriculture, luxury real estate, and border politics. Like the infinity storytelling of The 1001 Nights, stories fold into dreams and back into stories, a constellation of voices settle over mountains and into the earth. Intertwining color 16mm with textural black and white film hand processed with the dates leftover from harvest and plants native to the valley Feet in Water, Head on Fire…

  • Motus

    Using the long take and still framing, this film evokes the movement of Montreal as a city rapidly changing through massive construction projects while also experiencing a housing crisis. Not so much a city symphony, “Motus” seeks to create a sleep-like state through abstract lines, muddy grain, and other forms of frame and shutter movement. An homage to the prog-rock scores of the Italian horror films of the 1970s, the music harkens back to the era when I discovered cinema in Montreal movie places such as the Imperial. Utilisant le long plan et le cadrage immobile, ce film évoque le…

  • Skyscraper Film

    Can I use the film strip structure as an architectural element? Is it possible to use the celluloid from the film as a cement? Can these skyscrapers be turned into something else? Can solid lines blend into sensual, natural curves? Can I melt skyscrapers? Skyscraper Film was created to try to give a visual answer to these questions, arising from the artist’s relation to urban maps of various locations and their respective skylines, populated by imposing skyscrapers and reinforced concrete panoramas: Quebec, Kingston (Canada), Maryland, Pittsburgh, Baltimore (USA) etc. Cities are presented to us as an abstract handmade camera-less collage,…

  • Assembly

    Assembly is a short film that illustrates the struggle of the working class in Peru, in relation to the global workers movement. The grainy images, canted shots, still images and Russian montages offer a captivating five minutes of social reality in the fight against Neoliberalism. This film was commissioned by the Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto (LIFT) with the goal to capture the spirit of Super 8 and celebrate LIFT’s 30th anniversary.