Film Categories: dance

  • Kiri and The Girl

    Based on the experiences of Tlingit artist Kiri Geen as she reconnected and reclaimed her Indigenous heritage after her adoption, “Kiri and The Girl” follows young Kiri as she navigates losing her mother and is guided to becoming her true self.

  • I’ve Heard a Siren Calling

    A Great Lake Surfer has recently began her transition as a Trans Woman. She now is having hesitations with putting her wetsuit back on, but something is calling her back. In the isolation of her cabin in a small fishing town, she seeks to find the courage to face her fears.

  • xīn nī 廖芯妮

    xīn nī 廖芯妮 (“understanding you”) is an intimate auto-ethnographic portrait expressed through dance and digital technologies. Liaw engages in intergenerational conversations with her family and community to transform the linguistic divide between her Chinese name and its Hakka translation into a space for healing. Drawing on themes of decolonizing queerness to emphasize self-love and self-curiosity, the work explores both physical and technological attachments. Bodies made up of 3D-rendered cultural objects hold space for the stories of Liaw’s elders, while expanding the growing web of her ancestral knowledge. 

  • Les fleurs du mâle

    “The mysterious creature, Salma, realizes that being herself has repercussions on her life and that she will never be accepted as she is. So she decides to ask the creatress of this world for mercy.” The film was shot in super 8 in-camera edited. It was inspired by the letter sent by Charles Baudelaire to the Empress Eugenie after being censored and fined for his book “Les fleurs du mal”. The reason of the condemnation: offense to public morals and good manners as well as offense to religious morality.

  • 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

  • Der Untermensch

    Dedicated to the memory of the Second World War’s homosexual victims. This short contemporary dance film abstractly depicts the persecution of homosexuals at the hands of the Third Reich by establishing a parallel between incarceration in the camps and the physical confinement felt when freedom is suppressed.

  • Saint-Rémi

    Abandoned in the debris of a mine, a dancer is revived by the celestial energy pulsating within him. Filmed in Quebec’s former asbestos mine of Saint-Rémi-de-Tingwick, this short film features the artist’s ‘Tetrahedron’ iron sculpture in which he dances. Serving as both a prison and a pedestal, this sculpture symbolises humanity’s detrimental creations that both elevate and destroy. This duality is also echoed in the magnificent yet barren lunar landscape of the mine, which has remained sterile since its closure in 1968. Despite the desolation, ‘Saint-Rémi’ is an ode to revegetation, a hope that flora, like the dancer, will resurface…

  • 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…

  • 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.

  • A Flame the Colour of Air

    Medieval Catholic mystic Hildegard von Bingen reconciles the virgin/whore dichotomy in a psychedelic, erotic vision. Hildegard was known for her waking visions of the divine, her musical compositions, and her extensive medical encyclopedias. The animated imagery in this film is inspired by her surviving transcriptions, which suggest a departure from the mainstream views of her culture. In this speculative fictional tale, Hildegard has a vision in which erotic dancers appear to her as embodiments of the divine. The narration is strategically selected and collaged from Hildegard’s texts.