Film Categories: Ecology

  • FLOW

    A stuffed pig, a pregnant woman, and a polar bear are among the unlikely cast of FLOW, a playful and surreal video shot entirely underwater. Unfolding within a concrete triptych the players alternately drift and hurry, locked in a dance of beginnings and endings.

  • Toraanisqatsi

    Leif Harmsen’s remake of Godrey Reggio’s classic independent film “Koyaanisqatsi” was shot on Super 8 film entirely on location in Toronto by invitation to the Splice This! 2005 Super 8 Film Festival. Bob Wiseman wrote and performed the evocative instrumental soundtrack. “Toraanisqatsi” is an environmental thriller set in the Toronto of the 21st century, a city taken over by cars, fast food, electronic billboards, jetliners, industry and pollution. It is seen through the terrified eyes of a living breathing human. All transportation for this film was done by bicycle or foot.

  • fall storm (california 2003)

    Sitting in a quiet room; listening to a storm out the window.

  • Crystals

    A cinematic tribute to William Bentley, a Vermont dairy farmer who pioneered the “art” of snowflake photography for forty-six winters (1885-1931), proving that no two of his 5381 specimens were identical. This film contains about 1500 examples (fewer than the average snowball), showing the incredible variation of design in nature, while producing the effect of an “organic” hexagonal mandala in a state of continual metamorphosis.

  • Along the Way

    A visual journal or diary, an experimental “travelogue,” where the signposts of interest are equally elements of architecture and plant life as people and events. Imposition of formal compositional strategies vies with the revelation of off-hand personal gesture to continually regenerate interest and belie expectation. Both a reminiscence and an ongoing investigation, the intent is to communicate the essential quality of “place,” which is always an amalgam of the visual and emotional. Friends who populate the images provide personal anecdotes for the soundtrack. Powerful (and painful) events in my life during the period of the film’s completion certainly influenced its…

  • Lake Ontario (in my head)

    A meditative look at a mutable and hypnotic horizon. Grainy Super 8 imagery, optically printed 16mm footage and an atmospheric soundtrack evoke the stillness of mind reached when standing before expansive sky and water. Filmed at Gibraltar Point Centre for the Arts, Lake Ontario (in my head) was created as part of LIFT’s 25th anniversary Film is Dead… Long Live Film! commissioning project.

  • Gigantic

    Through the voice of a travelling narrator, we are shown the world through the eyes of a young and seemingly mad vagabond who speaks of his adventures, dreams, and experiences throughout Toronto, New York, and eventually Argentina.

  • Dying for the Pleasure

    “Dying for the Pleasure” is the result of a poem-as-script strategy. It is a darkly humorous, kaleidoscopic trip down Memory Lane, the audience witness to a woman’s anxiety surrounding the loss of our humanity after we “crawl inside,” to become enveloped, shielded, and cut off from others by a body of steel. Director: Katrin Bowen Writer, Producer: Heather Haley

  • Shelter, The

    After a tragic event that destroyed human civilization, two survivors wander around a destroyed building. The younger one, full of hope, thinks he can arrange the situation by finding other possible survivors, while the elder waits for his hour to come by making art with the debris of the late Civilization.

  • Kolam (Pool)

    “‘Pool’ is a touching portrait of a community attempting to rebuild and heal itself following the devastating 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami that shocked the world. The titular swimming pool is a temporary makeshift basin created to help the children of Aceh, Indonesia, face their fear of water and learn to swim again, despite the losses their community suffered when the sea came crashing in. Chong Chan Fui observes their progress with affection and a poet’s eye.” – Andrea Picard, Toronto International Film Festival In Indonesian, Acehnese and English with English subtitles. Awards: Winner of the Award for Best Canadian Short,…