Film Categories: Ecology

  • Meltwater

    Meltwater is an icy terrain that dissolves into sweeping waves of shadows. Blurring the horizon between the real and the imagined, the possible and the unthinkable, this vision is a meditation on global warming and its havoc on the rhythms of the natural world. In addition to festival presentation, Meltwater can be played as a seamless, infinite loop in a single or multi-channel installation.

  • Hag’s Taper

    The many names of the herb mullein include hag’s taper, Jupiter’s rod, flannel leaf, velvet plant, felt-wort, tinder plant, candlewick plant, witch’s candle, lady’s foxglove, candlewick plant, torches, cowboy toilet paper, and more. Brought by European settlers to what is now known as Canada over 250 years ago, mullein is native to parts of Europe and Asia. The introduced plant was valued for its medicinal abilities and its use as a fish poison. Today, it is considered a noxious weed in so-called Alberta. This video was shot in the Crowsnest Pass, Alberta where mullein thrives in the disturbed sites including…

  • Behemoth (six legs good, two legs bad)

    Behemoth (six legs good, two legs bad) is an animated film featuring six bee genera. Made using animated stills, Super-8 and 16mm footage, optical printing, and cameraless techniques.

  • Orgy of the Blood Parasites

    J. G. Ballard’s novel High-Rise and Cronenberg’s film Shivers, both of which detail an apartment building’s descents into chaos, were released in 1975, creating a collision in history as fascinating as it is bizarre. Both are about non-normative sex in imposing spatialities and both are visions of disturbed surrealist dystopia of body mutations. Later in his career, in 1996, Cronenberg adapted a J. G. Ballard novel with the fetishistic film Crash, but in Shivers, dread and disgust circulate spatially around the apartment complex on Nun’s Island, next to the city of Montréal, to which I have returned. I bring together…

  • Petal to the Metal

    This hand-processed 16mm film reflects on botanical animism. It is a song written for night-crawlers, compost, and shadows, inspired by human flower-lust. Water, fire, earth and air are interwoven with the garden’s creature crew. The work draws a parallel between the photographic alchemy of cinematic experiments and the photosynthetic processes of plants. Honourable mention, Top Canadian Short Jury Award, GIRAF 17 (2021).

  • Island Cowboy

    Island Cowboy is a documentary that follows a Canadian beekeeper on Prince Edward Island during one of his last years of work. At the age of 68, Stan Sandler would like to retire, but impending threats to his island home’s ecosystem threaten the future of the bees, and the health of the environment. The relationship between a beekeeper’s labour and the economy of the island’s blueberry crop is explored through a season of beekeeping, as we get an intimate look at Stan and the “bee cowboys”.

  • Transit – Destination

    Cities are where people tend to nest. This is where we can engage in the greatest range of pursuits while being provided a reasonable likelihood of day to day sustenance. While not apparent for the most part, cities require far flung resources making them islands or something akin to a space station. Cities are also de facto barriers for many other animal species, especially those that require migration routes to survive. Note: The voices are Kent Tate and a friendly passerby engaging in a conversation about birds while he was filming some office towers.

  • Exercises for Being Close to You: A Story for the Arctic Refuge

    Exercises for Being Close to You is an experimental documentary that follows a group of hikers through Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The team is in search of the Porcupine Caribou herd in hopes of collecting stories that could help push back on oil exploration and drilling on the caribou’s birthing grounds. The narrator, admitting to a perverse desire to be close to everything, wants nothing more than to spoon a caribou. As the film culminates in anticipation of the “money shot”, the audience is pushed to evaluate its expectations of nature films. Meanwhile, the expedition team is left to…

  • Pinhole Park

    “Pinhole Park” was created using a 35mm film tin modified into an outward-looking 59-pinhole camera that registers images on a single film loop mounted in the tin. Each loop is exposed in one moment with 59 pinhole “lenses” to create as many distinct images that, when presented in series, create a panning of the landscape in various directions. The work was exposed on outdated black-and-white 35mm print stock acquired from Archives Canada discards, and processed by hand in Caffenol chemistry, a less environmentally impactful developer made with coffee, vitamin C, and washing soda. The film and photographs document a city…

  • До Землі (To the Ground)

    A three-channel video installation which depicts various plants from Saskatchewan that were captured during my year-long mentorship with Sandra Semchuk (supported by BC Arts Council). The project applies the approach of ethnobotany, in this case combining stories of both Ukrainian and Ukrainian Canadian people about the medicinal use of different plants. The video triptych pairs close-ups of plants together with audio stories about them, giving an inside view of an interwoven connection between Ukrainian people and plants, while at the same time unveiling the history of immigration through individual family stories. By including both English and Ukrainian language the work…