Film Categories: Gender

  • the smallest steps

    What does it take to have a voice? For women whose voices are often suppressed, the journey is full of challenges. Many quit along the way. But in Ottawa, Ontario, two law students and two survivors of violence have decided to take a stand and join the anti-violence movement. The only trouble is, they don’t know how to be activists. In their homes and on the streets, they take their first activist steps while veteran activists provide historical context to the movement. If they can overcome the personal and political barriers that threaten to derail them, they will join a…

  • The Translation is Approximate

    This video focuses a conversation that Naqvi witnessed between her aunt and a domestic worker over financial matters. For many reasons — the ambivalence of the situation, the respective socioeconomic positions of the two women involved in the scene, and the very nature of the recording, which careened between documentary and voyeurism — these images have long haunted Naqvi. In the Translation is Approximate (2021), Naqvi retrieves the original footage that she shot in 2013 and traces back her thoughts about what motivated her to revisit this material. This short video both provides insight into her approach and fundamentally questions…

  • Seaview

    Seaview (2015) is an experimental film which combines home video and captured footage from Karachi, Pakistan. Naqvi travels back to her family’s country of origin to compare childhood memories of this place with lived experience. In the first sequence, she shows video footage of her first trip to Clifton Beach in Karachi. The accompanying text describes her visit to the same beach seventeen years later, and the difficulties in trying to document this place, both as an image maker and as a woman. Naqvi confronts her own personal struggle of being caught between the ideals of Western and Eastern societies.…

  • Farzana

    Inspired by a true story, Farzana (2021) is a short narrative film which revolves around the relationship of two middle-aged women and how they navigate their work in the home. Charmaine is a psychotherapist who works from home, and she hires Nasreen as a domestic worker to help her maintain her household. Nasreen is a recent migrant who is dealing with financial precarity. When there is a crisis in Nasreen’s family, she asks for assistance from Charmaine, but lack of trust between the two women results in hostility and conflict. We see all of this through the eyes of Zinnia,…

  • i see me watching

    Based on the artist’s personal struggle with gender, i see me watching speculates on the journey to and struggle with finding identity by presenting a first-person depiction of a singular self that has been split into two. The film displays the character’s ever-changing emotions as they follow an anonymous figure through unfamiliar surroundings, and gain awareness of the figure as an integral part of their being.

  • He Loves Me Until He Hates Me

    He Loves Me Until He Hates Me is the long-form music video from Baby, You’re Projecting, Vivek Shraya’s debut label release on Mint Records. Director statement: Taking inspiration from such 90’s classics like The Bodyguard and erotic thrillers, “He Loves Me Until He Hates Me” creates a meaningful (and playful) look at the unpredictability of masculinity–how it can fluctuate in insidious ways within a relationship, how one can be worn down in this type of power dynamic, and worse, how that can turn into lateral violence towards other women.

  • Atmospheric Arrivals

    This film is at once a living archive/polytemporal memory bank and a love letter to my other selves. I consider the act of revisiting my personal archives a time travelling practice and incorporating this into my films is an exercise in making said practice legible to others. “Atmospheric Arrivals” is about home and the (im)possibility of return. The “atmospheric arrival” captures a means of coming into being through memory and imagination; by reaching across spacetimes to “fetch” parts of the self that may exist in elsewheres.

  • Matin Dans Une Foret de Pins (Morning in the Pine Forest)

    The lives of six young people unfold in a journey through different worlds revealed and interwoven, where the boundaries between documentary and fiction, reality and dream cease to exist. The volatile and seductive landscape of urban and rural Latvia was treated as a rich context for the complex relationships one has with the world – inviting the viewer to come upon the questions that bind us in our common need to understand our humanness. This film is based on the lives of HELENA, EVA, JANKA, GUNTIS, ANNA and GALC.

  • Freya

    Tethering falconry and motherhood, Freya weaves together themes of death and magic, where seasons re-arrange, just as myth and memory are re-cast through a childhood spell.

  • Gags N’ Gals: Male Order

    A short experimental film inspired by the paintings of biblical women from German Renaissance painter, Lucas Cranach. The film reimagines Cranach’s paintings through a modern, critical lens, exploring female sensuality and their ability to use it as their own personal weapons.