Film Categories: Geography

  • Crushed Between Ocean and Sky

    An unexpected event on a tall ship headed for Antarctica incites passengers to reflect on life, death, adventure and irony against the vast ocean backdrop. Crushed Between Ocean and Sky speaks to the transcendence of exploring new places, the power of nature and life’s brutal tendency to catch us off guard.

  • Feet in Water, Head on Fire

    Along the San Andreas fault line in Southern California, Indigenous palm trees and date palms imported from West Asia flourish. The people who tend to them reflect a landscape of frictions and affections shaped over generations by agriculture, luxury real estate, and border politics. Like the infinity storytelling of The 1001 Nights, stories fold into dreams and back into stories, a constellation of voices settle over mountains and into the earth. Intertwining color 16mm with textural black and white film hand processed with the dates leftover from harvest and plants native to the valley Feet in Water, Head on Fire…

  • Positive Transparencies

    ‘Positive Transparencies’ captures the tensions arising from the destruction and reconstruction of 17 individual 35mm analog slides. Using Hornby Island as its focal point, the film explores the methods of observing, transforming, and transmuting the natural world through technology. Employing analog deconstruction, the project repurposes the island’s landscapes, creating dynamic motion sequences that emulate a process of artistic disintegration.

  • Wanderings through the delta

    2 x 2k or 4k video installation. Alternately available as a single channel program with both image tracks in one file. Colour. Run time 22′. Presented here with both channels combined into one stream. Ideal projection size: 2 x 8’x15′ or larger. Exhibition setup is flexible: ideal scenarios are a single long wall or two hanging screens either aligned in straight line or at an angle of approx. 120 degrees to each other. NOTE: This film has NO voiceover. The subtitles stand on their own and do not correspond to any recorded voice track. A film of current urgency, now…

  • Cod Story

    This is a case study of the Canadian cod fisheries collapse of 1992. It investigates what the future of natural resource management holds, and what we can learn from our past mistakes.

  • Where the snow-fed Rio del Llano met the edge of the desert

    Where the snow-fed Rio del Llano met the edge of the desert(2023 Length: 04:56 min), is a site specific film, in 2019 I visited the geographical location, Pear blossom Highway in California which is near the Antelope Valley (the armpit of California). A place also known as The Socialist Ruins. Here, Job Harriman, a socialist lawyer who ran for Vice President of the United States, Governor of California and Mayor of Los Angeles, founded in 1914 the cooperative colony – Llano del Rio which means plain by the river and the colony flourished for four years between 1914 to 1918.…

  • Go Between

    Looking down at the Brisbane River–a play of masking and superimpositions. Sound by Samuel La France. Made in residency at Container, Brisbane and nanolab, Daylesford.

  • Karaoke

    The home has changed. The palm oil trees have grown in endless symmetry. The landscape rusts and the nostalgia turns. KARAOKE is a homecoming story. BETIK returns to his village to help his mother with the karaoke a few years after the death of his father. During the day, he has also taken a job with his uncle making karaoke videos. KARAOKE is a story that takes you back home yet reminds you to go back where you came from. KARAOKE is a debut feature film about home and deception in a karaoke club within a palm oil plantation in…

  • My Canada Train Journey

    50-plus years after a memorable overnight Canadian train ride, Sandy McLennan boards regional and remote lines, with main line and public transit between them. This time shooting Double 8mm film, the same format he fell in love with while screening family home movies just for himself. What was he thinking?

  • through the bushes and the trees, you’ll find me

    “through the bushes and the trees, you’ll find me” intertwines the personal and political histories of Hanlan’s Point Beach, the site of Canada’s first pride gathering in the early 1970s. A hole punch serves as a symbolic peephole, reflecting the cruising areas on the beach that invite both spectatorship and participation. By situating the tender moments of queer affection amidst the vast body of water surrounding the Toronto islands, the film celebrates and interrogates the histories and spaces of queer love and resistance. This work was made by hole punching frame by frame using a cricut machine, then manually taping…