Film Categories: Crime

  • The Translation is Approximate

    This video focuses a conversation that Naqvi witnessed between her aunt and a domestic worker over financial matters. For many reasons — the ambivalence of the situation, the respective socioeconomic positions of the two women involved in the scene, and the very nature of the recording, which careened between documentary and voyeurism — these images have long haunted Naqvi. In the Translation is Approximate (2021), Naqvi retrieves the original footage that she shot in 2013 and traces back her thoughts about what motivated her to revisit this material. This short video both provides insight into her approach and fundamentally questions…

  • Ever Wanting (for Margaret Chung)

    Inspired by San Francisco’s first Chinese American female physician, this film envisions the euphoria and despair of Margaret Chung and her insatiable desire for women and celebrity through her forays into drugs, sapphic surgeries, and queer flights of fancy. Image description: A black-and-white archival image toned warm purple, showing a woman dancing with arms raised to the side and skirt flared out in a circle.

  • Private View

    A view out my window and worries in my head. — A PRIVATE VIEW is a site-specific collective screening series curated by John Woods and created as a part of Iris Film Collective’s IN HOUSE series. What is private space and what is public? In the subdivided landscape of Vancouver privacy can be evasive, but each of us views our home as our castle and our homes’ windows give us a unique vantage point that is ours and ours alone. Iris member John Woods gave a roll of expired colour film stock to each of the members of the collective…

  • Sammy

    Toronto, July 27, 2013, shortly after midnight. Sammy Yatim is standing inside an empty streetcar, a small knife in his right hand. A Toronto Police officer will shoot him dead. From a mixture of gunpowder, blood and acrimony: the portrait of a boy who didn’t have to die.

  • The Ritual of the Sex Magick Warriors

    The Sex Magick Warriors are organizing, they reveal themselves to the city and risk it all to carry out an obscure objective. The colors pink and teal are the embodiment of Magick, Art and Sexuality and their use by the warriors -through empathy, telepathy and tactile care- spills the tea on their means for survival in these harsh urban environments. The ritual exposes the hardships of this army of lovers and reveals their sensual strategy for self preservation.

  • Underground

    Underground presents a performative and re-staged first person documentary portrait of Westminster Station/London Underground, based on footage captured during the time period leading up to and just after the July 7th 2005 transit bombings. Through re-working the original footage, this short piece sets out to explore and present the contradictory moods of the time, from the more official government position of carrying on as usual, to the sense of anxiety felt in the day to day, while highlighting the intangible effects of trauma which shaped the experience of the city and urban space at this time.

  • premièrement comme tragédie

    With a friend we play a game, negotiating sex and risk but providing only evasive deflection and questions. My friend and I negotiate with each other, I to him in French and him to me in English. We fuck. The scene plays again, simultaneously but we play the role of the other person. Him to me in French and me to him in English. We switch roles. The negotiation scene and subsequent sex act are transcribed and we learn each other’s part and switch roles. The two tapes are then layered onto each other so both scenes play out simultaneously.…

  • 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.

  • Reinaldo’s Motifs

    In 1927, Reinaldo Ferreira, a well-known journalist and writer who published under the pen name ‘Repórter X’, founded the cinema production company Repórter X Film, through which he directed four films that same year. Among them we find “O Táxi no. 9297” and “Rita ou Rito?…”, where homosexuality, transvestism and drug use feature explicitly in Portuguese cinema for the first time. “Reinaldo’s Motifs” is an audiovisual essay that focuses on a series of recurrent motifs in Reinaldo Ferreira’s cinematic work. A commissioned work by the Cinemateca Portuguesa, in which I tried to play around with these recurrences, in a manner…

  • Sira

    ‘Sira’, in Arabic, literally translated, means biography. Arabs are a people known for their oral tradition. Through excavated footage and narration, Sira examines the displacement of a family, beginning with the event that catapulted their exodus from Kuwait as a result of the Iraqi invasion.