Film Categories: Ethnography

  • Untitled

    A performance film consisting of a string of five slow motion portraits of a young woman. Each portrait varies in length and gesture as her myriad expressions invite our gaze. With each action performed in dead silence, stretched to the limits of voyeuristic levels of comfort, the simple act of looking is made fragile. A curious exchange is established between spectator, creator, and subject through a careful appropriation and reframing of social media conventions and advertising iconography transposed into a cinematic space—pointing to a cycle of regressive media consumption.

  • Burning Mountains That Spew Flame (Montañas ardientes que vomitan fuego)

    The interior of the earth became a refuge from the threat that moved closer and closer to the island. The volcanic tubes served as communication vessels between time and space. This was where they experimented their resistance.

  • The Fenestration of Suburbia

    The Fenestration of Suburbia is a melancholic social documentation of a cold Canadian suburb. Framed behind windows and surveilled from the street, the lives of suburbanites float in the black cinematic frame to form images that are simultaneously sorrowful, mundane, theatrical, and puzzling.

  • premièrement comme tragédie

    With a friend we play a game, negotiating sex and risk but providing only evasive deflection and questions. My friend and I negotiate with each other, I to him in French and him to me in English. We fuck. The scene plays again, simultaneously but we play the role of the other person. Him to me in French and me to him in English. We switch roles. The negotiation scene and subsequent sex act are transcribed and we learn each other’s part and switch roles. The two tapes are then layered onto each other so both scenes play out simultaneously.…

  • vulture

    “vulture” sets its sight on farm animals and their surrounding flora. Static shots and slow-moving zooms, follow the grazing animals in their minute inter-species exchanges. When left to roam together the sensibilities of these “beasts” are allowed to surface. The film was shot and processed with various means including flower/plant processing carried out as blooming occurred, from 2016-18. In some cases a salt bath was used for fixing the film which was left soaking in the dark for three days. “Vultures hover over the barn, from high, with razor sharp eyesight, and a keen sense of smell. Together, they stalk…

  • Leagan (Peppermint Ashes)

    It has been a many years since Irina and her mother left Romania to live in Montreal. Away from their family, Irina becomes disconnected and absorbed in virtual worlds which separate her from her mother. When she is faced with the passing of a grandparent, she turns to her closest ally in an attempt to understand the meaning of loss and family through distance and time.

  • Doing and undoing: poems from within #1 radiotherapy

    It deals with interventions that I had made with my mother during her cancer treatment. The film is part of large project dealing with my mother’s cancer healing process. Hacer y Deshacer: Poems from Within (2019) is an interactive video installation. Most of the video sequences show Gelis’s mother undressing, one strand of yarn at a time, sometimes in Panama’s Casco Viejo (historic district), sometimes in the turbulent waters of the Pacific. Using her mother’s body, she tells the story of a cancer survivor, the story of countless others. Gelis invites us into the healing process: the viewer can change…

  • The Island

    A garden between Oakland and Berkley where its inhabitants, marginalized by gentrification, plant fruit trees and flowers to pay homage to their loved ones who died in battles against poverty. This is a space of love and freedom cared by Brian for the last 25 years. The island resists, as a living legacy of the Black Panthers who were the first to organize the neighbourhood.

  • Quimsacocha

    For the downstream communities of the high mountains of Quimsacocha, water is sacred. So when the giant Canadian company set their eyes to mine their land for gold and copper, 30-year-old Bolivar and 73-year-old Isaura were not happy. Isaura and Bolivar rely on water for their livelihood. Isaura owns four cows and Bolivar is in charge of the community’s water system. For them, water is life, and mining will jeopardize the future of their communities. Quimsacocha takes an honest look at these indigenous communities, their cultural traditions, and their lives in this picturesque landscape of the Western Andes Mountains in…