Film Categories: environment

  • Views From Home: Facing North

    Views From Home: Facing North is a short video first shown as part of Edie Steiner’s lens-based exhibition at Gallery 44 Members Space in 2014. The project explores the changing view from her home on the Toronto waterfront from 2004 to late 2019 and is a record of rapid urban development over multiple seasons. The work began as an analogue photographic project on medium format film and later transformed into video recordings, gradually changing from analogue to digital processes over the years of the recordings. Central to the frame is the site of Fort York, which gradually disappears from view…

  • Before After Again

    In a series of reflections and reversals, this dual-projector film follows the flow of carbon from mountains to sea, as it is transformed from forest ecosystem into industrial landscape, and back again. Commissioned for the End of the World project by Iris Film Collective and funded by the Canada Arts Council. Although its interpretation was left entirely to us, the project title made reference to the West Coast as the edge or end of Canada; to global concerns over the compromised and fragile state of the planet; and to the often predicted “end of film”. To link the final films…

  • When We Are Nothing Left

    A minimalist film and study about time, infinity and the life cycle, created in the spirit of William Blake.

  • Animal Bridge U-3033

    Animal bridge is an experimental nature documentary about a green bridge above motor highway. Animal Bridge U-3033 is about the parallel realities of humans and wild animals. It’s filmed during a year on a bridge above motor highway. These bridges are architecturally engrossing structures, addressed only to the nature, allowing animals to cross the highway. The built environment meets the untouched nature in this narrow strip of urban forest. The 35mm film sequences shot with an old camera create contrast with a mysterious reality captured by trail cameras.

  • Granular Film – Beirut

    Reminiscence of a trip in Beirut. The sea. the palm trees, the buildings melt when my eyelids began to close. My memories now have a separate life of their own.

  • Landing Sites

    There are places that we seek, and there are places that find us. One can never know for sure which comes first; the seeking or the finding. Often the unexpected moment occurs, the unforeseen discovery. Landing Sites: Truck on a house – Car drifting on a flooded plain – Signs flying over a lake – A super storm engulfs a building – Ghost train – Lightening strikes a plywood structure – Rail yard secured by a fire fighter – Electrical discharge in central city – Outskirts of prairie dog town. Landing Sites in order of appearance: House on a truck…

  • Prairie Grizzly’s Peneplain

    “Prairie Grizzly’s Peneplain” is a meditation on various natural and manufactured landscapes in southern Saskatchewan. This region is part of an ancient Precambrian seabed rebounding from the last Ice Age which once had a dynamic range of wildlife, plants, and wetlands supporting various ancient cultures that flourished here for millennia. Up until the late 1800‘s the Prairie Grizzly thrived on the Canadian Prairies. The bears that managed to migrate further west to the Rocky Mountains faced a difficult transition, although they have managed to survive in their new homes. Along with the plains buffalo, the have become a presence in…

  • My Gentrification

    “A voice tells us: “a friend of mine drew a circle on a map and said, ‘this is where you wanna live’.” The this refers to a subsection of Toronto between Bathurst and Dufferin streets, but it could just as easily refer to the city as a whole, an area bustling with life. Or, at least it did. Marcos Arriaga’s “My Gentrification,” explores the changes in the ever-gentrifying metropolis through the lens of archival footage they procured through decades of documentation. There’s a real Jonas Mekas vibe to Arriaga’s film, which is replete with voiceover narration and grainy celluloid archival…

  • 75 Years

    The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki 75 years ago initiated The Cold War. 75 Years is a cinematic meditation on The Cold War and photography. 75 Years is comprised of surreal, evocative still photos put into motion and edited like cinematic footage. The images are often stunningly beautiful. Though not documentary, they feel like they were shot at ground zero of an annihilation. And they are sequenced to suggest such a narrative—from a Prologue to an Aftermath. All the images have some degree of motion blur, so they range from representational to abstract. At their most abstract, they look…

  • Xam

    Xam is a sci-fi exploration on the future of surveillance and body hacking. While in the London subway, an unsuspecting man opens a strange text, rendering him unconscious and dragging him through a wormhole. He awakes, lost, on the train tracks in Kiev, Ukraine, unable to communicate with friends or family. With the help of the hacker community in Kiev, and then Paris, the man harnesses alternative virtual transmissions in an attempt to find his way home. Xam is told through an intimate, first-person frame and video collage to emphasize the increasing integration of human and technology. The story is…