Film Categories: Film Farm

  • souvenir

    souvenir is made from hand-processed B&W 16 mm film hand-coloured with photochemical toners, and incorporates found sound. souvenir examines the evanescence of memory and the process of forgetting.

  • Kaleidoscope

    Kaleidoscope explores depression in an otherwise vibrant life. It is an original film poem edited to 16mm hand-processed B&W film that has been manipulated through tinting, toning and other cameraless techniques to reflect the fluctuations of living with a mood disorder. Footage collected during the Film for Artists and Film Farm residencies in 2016.

  • It Matters What

    Absences and translations motivate this experimental animation in an exploration of the methods and materials of reproduction and inscription. The inquiry is set within a framework of practical and critical human relationships with other-than-human-species elucidated by the theorist Donna Haraway. A fragment from Haraway’s essay “Tentacular Thinking: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene” is reworked here as a poetic manifesto. Enigmatic found-footage calls into question human violence over animal species. Plant life is both the subject matter of the images and assists the means of photographic reproduction.  The techniques used include in-camera animation, contact prints and phytograms created by the exposure of 16mm film overlaid with plant…

  • Froglight

    FROGLIGHT is a film about having faith in the unknown. “…glowing, shimmering, wow – and sentiments to or rather thinking, questioning, wondering… wondering, beautiful.” – Barbara Sternberg (Toronto filmmaker) “A shimmering black-and-white reflection of ineffable and wondrous experience.” – Jim Sinclair (Pacific Cinematheque, Vancouver) Award: Honourable Mention, Ann Arbor Film Festival, 2000. DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT: In FROGLIGHT, poetic voice-over narration is woven with images and sounds from the natural landscape to engage viewers’ imaginations. As a result of allowing elements to come magically together in the creative process, the film has an intangible sensibility that echoes the experience of trying to…

  • Originate and Recompile

    In 1962 Ernesto De Martino travelled to the South of Italy for his ethnographic research and shot “La Taranta”. A study around women who were poisoned by a Trantula bite while harvesting in the fields. The remedy against the deadly poison was a folk dance called Taranta. The women danced the poison out of their bodies with the help of local musicians and priests. Studies around this phenomenon have highlighted that, in the majority of cases, these women were suffering severe mental illness and hysteria due to sexual abuse and poverty. In present-day Italy a similar dynamic has resurfaced, uncovering…

  • Eidolon

    The seer passes beneath branches, crosses fields, observes the quiet corners of creation. Bright and dark take turns showing their faces, a two-sided phantasm, one energy shape-shifting through time. The seer makes note, gleans eidolons.

  • Into the Wild

    A glimpse through the cracks, somebody is walking in the meadow, trees and flowers trembling in the wind. A world that only film can see, a material flow emerging from the coupling of camera, celluloid, silver salts, chemicals, light particles and the hand of the filmmaker. The film was entirely processed by hand and chemically treated: overexposed images were brought back to life with bleach, other images were solarized and reversed.

  • The Sweater

    Historian Carolyn Steedman, in writing about her own working-class childhood, describes how, for children of working-class families, it is often the mother and not the father who embodies power. The child experiences a father who is relatively powerless in the larger social world outside the home, so that even if he is physically powerful, as my father was, he can simultaneously be perceived as a weak man. “The Sweater” blends 16mm hand processed film with found footage and video to explore childhood memories triggered by finding the last thing my deceased father gave me. Using short vignettes, I tell several…

  • Petal to the Metal

    This hand-processed 16mm film reflects on botanical animism. It is a song written for night-crawlers, compost, and shadows, inspired by human flower-lust. Water, fire, earth and air are interwoven with the garden’s creature crew. The work draws a parallel between the photographic alchemy of cinematic experiments and the photosynthetic processes of plants. Honourable mention, Top Canadian Short Jury Award, GIRAF 17 (2021).

  • What Comes Between

    What Comes Between is an examination of personal memory and loss rooted in the filmmaker’s birth place – Chile – and her departure from that country long ago. The work is a collage film created with found footage from personal and historic sources, and original hand printed and tinted footage.