Film Categories: Geography

  • Catalyst

    Being natural born pattern seekers, we are forever looking for this or that clue to help explain what otherwise might appear unfathomable. Fundamentally Catalyst represents a type of diary without dates, of memories reconstructed to formulate my story. A story that takes place in time and space, shaped by the earth and sky Merging super 8 mm footage that I filmed many years ago with some of my more recent DSLR/HDV tape footage, Catalyst investigates how each medium shaped my story as well as the gaps in time when each sequence was filmed. Filmed on location by Kent Tate: Toronto,…

  • Warning Shot

    One death. Three versions of the crime. James H. Wakasa, a 63-year-old Japanese American bachelor, was shot to death by military police at Topaz concentration camp during World War II. Was it justifiable homicide, an accidental fatality, or second-degree murder? The press said he was trying to escape, the shooter claimed it was a warning shot, the case file suggests he was killed while walking a dog. This experimental film essay uses the “Rashomon effect” to juxtapose the conflicting accounts detailing the circumstances and cause of Wakasa’s untimely death. Part of the Queer Camp Trilogy.

  • Semiotics of Sab

    This experimental film essay explores the poetics of identity through an oblique portrait of gay Japanese American actor Sab Shimono. For more than five decades, Shimono has performed on stage and screen in over 150 roles as warlords, bus boys, and businessmen. Shimono asks, “How is it that we know who we are?” Recalling early structuralist works by Hollis Frampton and Martha Rosler, Semiotics of Sab displays the grammatology of queer Asian American masculinity through conflicting lexicons of race, representation, and selfhood.

  • Traje de Luces | Suit of Lights

    Traje de Luces | Suit of Lights is an expressive documentary composed with footage of a Spanish bullfight, that iconic imagery of highly decorated masculinity and violence masked as nationalism. The footage was drawn from Jacques Madvo Collection material filmed in Spain between 1976-1978. Madvo shot this footage at a time when Spain began its difficult and flawed transition to democracy in the years following dictator Francisco Franco’s death in 1975. The film consists of 16mm footage that has been decayed in soil, contact-printed and laboriously re-photographed and these abstractions of light and darkness ground the inquiry surrounding why citizens…

  • Soy un ser cuyas raíces // I am a being whose roots

    Soy un ser cuyas raíces // I am a being whose roots reworks Jacques Madvo’s Countries & People: Venezuela to explore labour and migration. Taking the final words of the film’s voice-over as a starting point, Soy un ser cuyas raíces // I am a being whose roots pairs Madvo’s film footage with a text-based conversation with young Venezuelan literature scholar and language teacher Angel Said Dominguez Pinto. Dominguez Pinto relocated to Panama in 2014 to make a living teaching English, Spanish & German in Panama City after Venezuela’s economic collapse. Over e-mail, we co-authored a conversational text, exploring migration,…

  • Inventory

    Often the very things that appear to enable a sense of security, stability, and status can be disrupted, or rendered obsolete, destined to become a memory, or simply just forgotten. On the other hand, things that frame our passions while informing our dreams have the very real potential of retaining their meaning, regardless of any actual or imagined externalities. Before leaving home last July to begin an artist residency I went to pick up a couple of things at a nearby big box store only to discover that it had been closed. A crew was removing all the signs on…

  • Velocity

    I generally gravitate towards places that reveal the many layers of time when deciding on a particular location to set up my camera and tripod. This is when I like to imagine worlds that have passed, worlds that are present, and worlds that are yet to be. In 2009 Johan Rockström led the team which developed the “Planetary Boundaries Framework,” a set of 9 boundaries that they define as a “safe operating space for humanity.” These scientists assert that once certain thresholds or tipping points are passed there is a risk of “irreversible and abrupt environmental change.” In 1976 a…

  • Utopia

    The purpose of this or that, or its role in enabling a sense of security or status is ephemeral, depending on factors that may or may not be readily apparent. As systems shift from one emphasis to an other, or as one system supplants an other, the meaning of something can be altered to such a degree that a new description may be required to understand its context. Various intersections in downtown Vancouver including the Trump Tower looming over the other buildings – Fishing Boat approaches Ucluelet after some time out at sea – Afternoon clouds, Crowsnest Mountain – Lonely…

  • Cleveland: The Resurrected Arcade

    “The dreaming collective…through the arcades, communes with its own insides” – Walter Benjamin. A visit to the restored arcade in post-industrial Cleveland, the piece uses architectural footage and archival audio to explore the city’s repeated efforts in urban renewal.

  • The Solitary Life of the Stoic

    The ‘Solitary Life of the Stoic’ is a short documentary project that juxtaposes the formidable life story of a dignified woman in her nineties with imposing architectural structures and expressive imagery. Shot in Central Europe and integrated with portraits of Leah Laufer in Toronto, this film aligns visual poetry with the wisdom of an old friend, candid confessions of life at her stage and the gratitude of a Holocaust survivor.