Film Categories: Ethnography

  • ARTIFACT (circa 2006)

    The archaeology of Identity. Consider a world where all human communications are represented by numbers, a digital world. Imagine a future archaeologist finding a DV cassette from hundreds of years ago (a real found object, circa 2006, full length and uncut). Imagine trying to decode this ancient digital object, codecs unknown, obsolete, hardware long lost. Crack the code? Available algorithms scan, databases compare, construct, deconstruct, reconstruct the artifact. 2006, the dawn of self-by-numbers, digitized identity. What human fragments, fugitive narratives, remain? Do we have a future history? What will the algorithms decide? All bookings of this film include a free…

  • Livestock

    “Livestock” is a documentary study of one stage in the production of motion picture film. Most of the animals at the Warren Livestock Auction will be sold for industrial meat production. Their bodies will be slaughtered and processed, their bones prepared for rendering into gelatin that might one day suspend silver halide on a strip of acetate.

  • Una Sola Sangre

    “I have two homelands, but one blood,” says Silvia Galdes in Una Sola Sangre, the latest film by the Haitian-born, Toronto-based filmmaker Esery Mondesir. Silvia, along with her siblings Silverio and Estella, is a first-generation Haitian-Cuban, the daughter of Sylvain Galdes, one of an estimated 500.000 Haitians who migrated to Cuba for work in the early 20th century. Despite not seeing their father’s homeland until their sixth decades (and after the shooting of the film), the Galdes family and their social position in Cuba has long been marked by their Haitianness – an identity they and their children negotiate in…

  • Sammy

    Toronto, July 27, 2013, shortly after midnight. Sammy Yatim is standing inside an empty streetcar, a small knife in his right hand. A Toronto Police officer will shoot him dead. From a mixture of gunpowder, blood and acrimony: the portrait of a boy who didn’t have to die.

  • Mach Stem

    Part one in a series, Mach Stem is an essay about skincare, depression, memory loss, and the atomic bomb. Formulated from a discarded master’s thesis film, Mach Stem records the shadow of a long depression and the process of convalescence. Exploring sites of research, memory, and legacy, the film travels between continents to piece together one’s own identity that was previously lost at sea.