Film Categories: Class-struggle

  • Originate and Recompile

    In 1962 Ernesto De Martino travelled to the South of Italy for his ethnographic research and shot “La Taranta”. A study around women who were poisoned by a Trantula bite while harvesting in the fields. The remedy against the deadly poison was a folk dance called Taranta. The women danced the poison out of their bodies with the help of local musicians and priests. Studies around this phenomenon have highlighted that, in the majority of cases, these women were suffering severe mental illness and hysteria due to sexual abuse and poverty. In present-day Italy a similar dynamic has resurfaced, uncovering…

  • Every Day Burns

    Award winning pole dancer, Sada Velasquez, addresses the familial and social stigma she must overcome in order to pursue her passion for dance. Everyday Burns is a short documentary exploring one artist’s journey towards self expression and community empowerment. Every day Sada overcomes physical limitations, personal doubts and moral perceptions of others in order to create a safe space for folks to explore their sensual freedom.

  • Ofenheizung: Portrait of a Stove

    In Berlin in the year 2020, there are still homes that rely on coal stoves for heating, despite their ban in 2015 by the Federal Emission Control Ordinance. This short film is a portrait of one of those stoves, the maintenance it requires of the inhabitant of the home it’s in, and what it means for its Kiez, Kreuzberg.

  • Wash Day

    As they get ready for the day, three young Black women discuss the public perception of their Blackness in relation to their cultivation of a strong sense of self. Wash Day is an intimate exploration into how private, domestic acts such as washing your hair or putting on makeup become a significant re-acquaintance with the body, before and after navigating the politics of one’s outwardly appearance. Image description: A Black woman’s hands cradle long dark braids as water washes over them.

  • 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…

  • Brothers in Music

    John T. Davis (pianist/organist/vocalist) and Jim Heineman (saxophonist) are two Canadian jazzmen who have had to wage the war between the compulsion and the passion that they feel towards their music and the struggle that is involved with trying to make a living in the field of jazz music in Canada. John T. Davis is a Black musician from a poor rural environment. Jim Heineman is a white musician from a white middle-class urban environment. “Brothers in Music” begins by exploring the personalities, experiences and inspirations of these two very talented and different musicians and then moves on to examine…

  • May 35

    A haunting commemoration of the Tiananmen Square uprisings made from fragments of censored archival imagery transferred onto film using razor blades and scotch tape. “May 35” speaks to the difficulty of remembering in the absence of memory, especially when June 4 histories have been censored and obscured. It is a tribute to the thousands of lives devastated by this upheaval. Sound Design: Kadet Kuhne

  • Misadventures of Pussy Boy Trilogy

    “Misadventures of Pussy Boy” is trilogy of short videos subtitled “First Love”, “Sick” and “First Period”, each video’s running time is approximately 6 minutes, all videos are animated in a fashion that is very much “do-it-yourself” aesthetic, as told from the point of view of a transgendered youth in rural Cape Breton. Each video was animated by hand, the backgrounds were created like theatre back drops, with the characters hand painted and cut out, performing each scene in front of the matching background for the scene. Camera work involved shooting each shot for 3-5 seconds and then manipulating the characters…

  • Queer Camp Trilogy

    The Queer Camp Trilogy is a series of experimental films exploring the hidden dimensions of queer Japanese American wartime history. This trilogy, made up of Looking For Jiro (2011), Warning Shot (2016), and On the Line (2018), was inspired by first-generation Japanese Americans who were incarcerated by the US government during World War II. These subjects left subtle yet discernible traces of same-sex intimacy or gender nonconformity in the archive, despite the enormous pressure put upon Japanese Americans to accept their imprisonment quietly, prove their patriotic loyalty, and smile for Ansel Adams during their unlawful imprisonment. I approached their enigmatic…

  • IF YOU MEET ME ON THE ROAD

    Performance intervention in response to the shooting death of Brazilian national and British resident Jean Charles de Menezes by London police in a tube station July 22, 2005 on suspicion of terrorist activity.