Film Categories: Community

  • through the bushes and the trees, you’ll find me

    “through the bushes and the trees, you’ll find me” intertwines the personal and political histories of Hanlan’s Point Beach, the site of Canada’s first pride gathering in the early 1970s. A hole punch serves as a symbolic peephole, reflecting the cruising areas on the beach that invite both spectatorship and participation. By situating the tender moments of queer affection amidst the vast body of water surrounding the Toronto islands, the film celebrates and interrogates the histories and spaces of queer love and resistance. This work was made by hole punching frame by frame using a cricut machine, then manually taping…

  • back home

    back home follows filmmaker, Nisha Platzer’s pursuit to get to know her older brother, Josh, twenty years after he took his own life. As she connects with the friends who knew him best as a teen, a complex portrait emerges. Through intimate recollections re-imagined on Super8 and 16mm film, and lyrical images hand-processed with plants, seaweed, soil and ashes, ‘back home’ floats between memory and present time in a fragmented meditation on identity, grief and loss: illuminating the transformative power of healing in community.

  • 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…

  • Characters

    Hú Zhǎng Zū writes ancient Chinese poems with water on the ground in Fuxing Park, Shanghai. After a few minutes, the characters dry out and disappear. She comes to the park almost everyday and practices her handwriting with her friends and colleagues. Together they have lively discussions about the strokes and shapes – both amongst each other and with the many spectators. Hú Zhǎng Zū is the only woman within the bustling crowd of men, and due to her calligraphy skills she is respected and highly admired. I come back to see her often, in order to learn from her…

  • FIBERS

    This 15-minute hybrid non-fiction/experimental documentary essay blends Lida Mkrtchan’s voiceover testimony about her time in bomb shelters in Shushi (Artsakh/Nagorno-Karabakh) with a layered audiovisual landscape. The film moves between tactile close-ups of the narrator’s hands preparing zhengyalov bread and staged studio compositions in which objects, textures and performative gestures metaphorically reimagine the narrated events and inner states through dark video tableaux. The interplay of documentary and poetic imagery illustrates the resilience of the community under siege, the rhythm of daily life and the quiet actions that sustain hope. Moments of beauty, ritual and shared labour coexist alongside stark reflections on…

  • Both, Instrument & Sound

    Both, Instrument & Sound employs tension as an aesthetic strategy, to explore solidarity, collective struggle, and the transformation of these values under neoliberalism. The film follows the life of Tony over 3 years as he describes his process of political activism from the 1970s onwards, which cannot be disentangled from his friendships and his lovers. The film’s score – co-written with musicians, the film’s cast and crew – sonically explores different interpretations of tension—both in response to Tony’s narration and to the musicians’ existing approaches to tension as a musical, cinematic, scientific, and political experience. Everyone translates, performs and remixes…

  • Monument

    Beginning in ghostly abstraction and accumulating texture by texture into a droning meditative trance, Monument deepens to a visual and sonic intensity, mixing Super 8 film with video footage to create a complicated, multilayered encounter with the tension of protest and reclamation. A vivid and energetic durational experience of collective resistance and celebration. Super 8 footage of the decaying monuments of Presidents Park (Croaker, VA) are layered with video footage captured on Monument Avenue (Richmond, VA) during the Covid-19 pandemic and Black Lives Matter protests of 2020. Themes of registration and re- calibration are explored through form and content and…

  • En Memoria

    In a dystopian future, a mother struggles to finish making her daughter’s quinceañera dress.

  • We will talk about this after the last air raid alert stops

    This film, shot within a game simulation, focuses on the opposition between culture and nature and the possibilities of dealing with obsolete mechanisms of environmental exploitation. It’s a utopia about a post-war city that launches a recultivation program. The program is an attempt to create a new society where the aims of people do not stand in the way of the aims of other people, trees, rivers, chipmunks, mushrooms…” The game simulation was used as a platform to develop a speculative scenario in which humanity survives the challenges of the current century. Looking at the dystopias of the last century,…

  • Don’t Take My Joy Away

    In the Shatila Palestinian camp in Lebanon, two friends, Omar and Omar, find moments of joy amid hardship until sudden violence forces them to confront loss and survival.