Film Categories: Families

  • The Prince

    Olivia, a young tap-dancer and her uncle, Amir, an actor, struggle with what it means to be Middle-Eastern-American and artists in today’s racially divided world.

  • I Must Be Going

    A young finger puppet retrieves a letter left behind by her recently deceased brother.

  • Glimmer

    Looking within the forms of my daily life — homeschooling routines, my daughter’s face, shifting refractions of a hanging crystal — I seek to reimagine time not as a flowing river that carries us away, but a quiet lake in which we swim, circling back to moments that reverberate into the infinite. “Heaven would indeed be heaven if lovers were there permitted as much enjoyment as they had experienced on earth.” (Boccaccio) Completed during COVID lockdown for the Greetings From Isolation Project. Music by Colin Fisher.

  • The Eyes of Summer

    In a small and remote hamlet in Southern Sri Lanka, a little girl develops a curious friendship with a spirit who lives in an abandoned house. This film was shot in my mother’s village in Southern Sri Lanka—shortly after the civil war in 2010. Collaboratively developed with members of my family there, a narrative was improvised around an investigation into my mother’s interactions with spirits in the community during her childhood. Landing somewhere between horror fiction and “spectral” ethnography, the film describes a population reeling from devastations of the past, where distinctions between the living and the dead are thinning.

  • Unarchive

    Unarchive juxtaposes the filmmaker’s father’s life with the political history of Chile – his birthplace – over the past century. It reflects on how we remember and how we forget, and the role of the camera in transcending the complex space in between.

  • Queer Isolation

    Queer Isolation is an award-winning short drama produced for the Barrie Film Festival’s Youth Virtual Media Arts Program about Noelle, a young Vietnamese-Canadian transgender woman forced back into the closet when she moves back in with her parents after losing her job due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Image description: Hands hold a series of Polaroid photos in muted colours.

  • The Way We Are

    “The Way We Are” shares excerpts of stories from audio interviews with 4 queer Asian women living in Toronto: Katherine Chun, Wenda Li, Tamai Kobayashi, and Nancy Seto. Told in the present-tense, these stories are arranged in a way that explores the past as the present, and in doing so, immersing viewers into the real-lived experiences from a different generation. This film was inspired by the intimacy of looking through a photo album with loved ones; there is something nostalgic about the materiality of handling photographs, especially in this digital era where images are so increasingly ubiquitous. The act of…

  • Autoritratto

    A short piece commissioned by Antimatter Media Art, a “portrait of the artist by the artist”, first exhibited as part of Automat compilation. It consists of recycled 8mm footage of Canadian landscapes, mixed materials, ink and film cement. As an immigrant, looking for, and collecting, past images of Canada is a way of imagining a past that I don’t have in this country. The re-writing of the self is produced through the archive of others via associative montage.

  • 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.

  • Keep Both Eyes Open (All the Time)

    Keep Both Eyes Open is an obliquely autobiographical film in three sections. Found footage, home movies, and video processing are used to present matters of family, conflict, legacy, and inheritance. Inspired by the sudden resolution of a familial mystery.