Film Categories: Culture

  • Go Between

    Looking down at the Brisbane River–a play of masking and superimpositions. Sound by Samuel La France. Made in residency at Container, Brisbane and nanolab, Daylesford.

  • Missing Associates Redux

    In 1972, visual artist/filmmaker Peter Dudar and dancer/choreographer Lily Eng formed a multimedia partnership named MISSING ASSOCIATES. INVENT A NEW VOCABULARY. START FROM ZERO. OBSERVE AND INCORPORATE INVOLUNTARY MOVEMENT. MISSING ASSOCIATES [NOTES 1972] MISSING ASSOCIATES started the first wave of performance art and experimental dance in Toronto art galleries “MISSING ASSOCIATES ARE ON THE CUTTING EDGE OF EXPERIMENTAL PERFORMANCE.” ESPERIENZA A CONFRONTO IL DIARIO DI NAPOLI, 1980 Next, MISSING ASSOCIATES performed and screened throughout the Americas and both Western and Eastern Europe. “PETER DUDAR AND LILY ENG ARE REVELATORY.” YORK UNIVERSITY RETROSPECTIVE IS TORONTO BURNING C MAGAZINE, 2014

  • 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…

  • light in my eyes

    A personal and poetic walk through light, love, and memories of a blind grandfather. Artist/filmmaker Christopher Wiersema considers his grandfather’s enigmatic and eloquent point of view while playing with his own. The film’s soundscape centers around a phone call with the artist’s grandmother, Rina Pullia, as she reflects on caregiving for her husband, Angelo, in Chicagoland.

  • My Canada Train Journey

    50-plus years after a memorable overnight Canadian train ride, Sandy McLennan boards regional and remote lines, with main line and public transit between them. This time shooting Double 8mm film, the same format he fell in love with while screening family home movies just for himself. What was he thinking?

  • Babash

    “Babash” is a parrot who speaks mostly Farsi but ­sometimes mixes English and Azeri into his ­conversations. A singular language resulting from the place where he lives: a house in Los Angeles shared with an Iranian family. The same place where Behrouz Rae developed a friendship with Babash over the years. This short film is an associative portrait about a special relationship and the ­domestic surroundings in which it grew. An ­assemblage where household objects, daily movements and playful intimacies are mixed with a dauntless montage, precise sounds and a sensitive gaze. Observing this genuine cross-species friendship between Babash and…

  • The Courser

    We see white stone structures and hear the sound of horses at full gallop, snickering from afar. The sound volume increases rapidly and sets the large group of lithic sculptures in motion. Heavy traffic noises eventually mix with the animal sounds and just when they are about to take over the soundscape entirely, images and sounds introduce the actual location: Shanghai, at the intersection of Yan’an Elevated Road and Inner Ring Elevated Road, two major, multi-leveled, urban freeways. Amidst the massive architectural structures and immobile horses underneath it, we may remember Eadweard Muybridge and his early moving image studies.

  • 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…

  • Flamme dans l’eau

    A film exploring the poet Franck André Jamme’s journeys to Rajasthan and Nepal to seek out the origins of Tantric paintings used to awaken heightened states of consciousness. The film merges dream and legend in an exploration of these images that are made by anonymous painters, not to be bought and sold, but as tools of inner practice, as thresholds.

  • Goldjungen

    English Title: “Golden Boys” “If you speak in a low voice, no one hears you.” Two narrow alleys in Istanbul. A crowd of men, yelling. Screaming, shouting, chaotic gesticulation, ­grimacing faces, a deafening buzz of wild voices. The verbal noise dominates the scene. A communicative situation, incomprehensible at first to the alien bystander who doesn’t speak the language. ­Apparently they are traders, I find out. And they call it “the walking stock market”. But what does it really mean? “Today it’s a very quiet day. Everything is still at rest.”