Film Categories: environment

  • 04/19/1968

    Layers of history merge with layers of media in this hybrid experimental film. An autobiographical ode to the filmmaker’s family and what’s left of their memories. A remediation collage of 16mm film, old 35mm Kodak slides and a digital computer screen. Filmed with an old DSLR camera at a specific angle in order to capture the ethereal reflections.

  • Fevered

    ‘Fevered’ is a meditation on the heated drama enacted by lakes and rivers as winter unravels. Piecing together 16mm footage and sound recordings, Peters re-imagines the pulsing of waterways as a metaphorical rhizome swelling outward in a feverish response to global warming.

  • Dam’d

    Using 16mm film altered in part by algae and zebra mussels, ‘Dam’d’ illuminates parallel behaviours between human and invasive species and their impact on waterways. The mutation of film footage acts as a metaphor for the erosion and evolution of the aquatic ecosystems it records.

  • Shifting Baseline

    Motion picture film decomposes in a bath of toxic cyanobacteria collected from a shore where children are playing. A child’s piano improvisation plays over the bacterial impressions in memory of a fleeting moment. ‘Shifting Baseline’ combines ecological and filmic processes to capture and animate an environment that is rapidly slipping away.

  • 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.

  • Imagine none of this is real

    A strange, melancholy travelogue through the post-human world. A record of the land and the resonance of its history. The images and the medium exist in a tense balance, where each amplifies and distorts the other. This film is not only about the landscapes being captured, but the media being used to capture it.

  • 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…

  • 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”.