Film Categories: Families

  • Sira

    ‘Sira’, in Arabic, literally translated, means biography. Arabs are a people known for their oral tradition. Through excavated footage and narration, Sira examines the displacement of a family, beginning with the event that catapulted their exodus from Kuwait as a result of the Iraqi invasion.

  • Presentation

    Holly, an anxiety-ridden high school sophomore, is faced with the challenge of giving a class presentation. As a result, she considers self medicating with Xanax.

  • Bubba

    BUBBA shows the portrait of an old man (the filmmaker’s grandfather), altered in several, increasingly abstracting ways. The first way the man is shown is through composite imaging, and the use of masks while shooting 16mm on a Bolex camera, achieving surreal, distorted, cubist-like impressions of the face. The second effect was achieved by sandwiching the negative print and positive print of the original portraits and printing them using a Model J printer. The third, and final effect was generated by hand processing the negative/positive hybrid, alongside negatives from a previous film. The concluding effect is a feeling of the…

  • America

    An Iranian journalist couple wants to move to America to escape the difficulties of their country. The woman receives her visa but her husband doesn’t. He stays in Iran and watches his wife find success on television and falls into a state of depression.

  • Father Knows Father Best

    Utilizing damaged film loops and photograms, “Father Knows Father Best” plays off an old found-footage print of the American situation comedy to highlight a dysfunctional family paradigm. Malcolm Goldstein’s experimental violin soundings exploit the atonal dialogue.

  • Video Home System

    ‘Video Home System’ traces the convergence of popular culture and politics in Pakistan during the 1980s and 1990s. This video showcases the connections between pop culture and nationalism, and how bootleg economies kept the cinema industry alive during periods of censorship. Image description: A young man sits at a desk behind a pile of VHS tapes, illuminated by a desk lamp. The wall behind him is vivid green.

  • Silvia in the Waves / Silvia dans les vagues

    Noa struggles to honor the identity of his recently deceased parent while his mother tries to uphold the appearance of a conventional family. Grief and fantasy entwine to reveal the complex relationship between history and erasure, identity and memory.

  • Iridescence

    “Iridescence” is an experimental visual short film, which exposes how society needs to label a person by their sexuality. In this story, dance and interpretive movement replaces the dialogue, allowing us to use the body to communicate the relationship between the characters and they’re true human emotions. Through stylize lighting and abstract visual, Iridescence tells the story of an emotionally repressed abusive father and his son who struggles to accept himself and his sexuality.

  • Protector

    “Protector” is the first in a series of short documentaries that explores Osborne’s relationship with their uncle/godfather and his experiences with Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), institutionalization, and working in Mental Health.”Protector” attempts to portray a person living with DID in an authentic and multi-faceted way. This documentary was funded by the Ontario Arts Council.