Film Categories: history

  • BROKEN ANGEL (GEBROCHENGEL)

    In Frankfurt near St. Peter’s church on Klaus-Mann-Platz, there is a memorial with an angel sculpture (aka Frankfurter Engel) for the homosexual men and women persecuted and murdered during the Third Reich. 2013 was a tumultuous year for LGBT rights like the spike in hate crimes in the U.S. post-DOMA, and passing of anti-gay legislation worldwide (most notably Russia and India). On 6 May 2013, the anniversary of Marlene Dietrich’s death and 80th year past the Third Reich, Stephen explores the historical and ongoing queer struggle and gilded apology of monuments in a guerilla performance by colliding the Frankfurter Engel…

  • ars memorativa

    ars memorativa is an experimental documentary in four chapters that examines what is left behind when someone passes away and how memory traces emerge from the remaining artifacts and memories. the four people intersected with the directors life in a variety of ways and their stories are shared in a mix of forms: hand processed celluloid, digital animation, audio interview and home movies.

  • Former Models

    A public and private history undo themself(ves) as they mutually encounter the trials of Labor, Love, Loss and Planned Obsolescence. A body desires its Other: a simulation is transgressed and the ultimate price is paid- “No-body is above The Law.” In this docu-narrative, the tragic story of Milli Vanilli’s Robert Pilatus and his descent into a post-racial and post-gendered pure image is told through appropriated video footage. A fabricated narrative conceived by the artist collides with Pilatus’ public biography in a technologically mediated flash of desire and information. This video is dedicated to the very real life of Robert Pilatus, 1965-1998.  

  • DP2

    DP2 is the restored version of the film DP (Displaced Person), originally released in 1982. Uniquely melding documentary and contemporary performance art, DP2 is based on the reminiscences of a displaced Ukrainian who spent most of World War II in Nazi Germany and miraculously survived forced labour, concentration camp internment, and near-deportation to Siberia. Intercut with the narrative are dynamic movement sequences shot in a vast glass and marble structure, choreographed and performed by Lily Eng (Canadian Spotlight Artist, Reel Asian International Film Festival, 2011). Eng’s action sequences expand the intellectual and emotional resonances of the narrative, and vice versa. Her…

  • SPANKIN

    An anagram of “napkins,” SPANKIN transposes the gay hanky code of the 70s onto contemporary coffee culture. Although humorous in content, SPANKIN is an allegory for hierarchical relations within minority groups, consumerist co-optation of identity, and the collective historical forgetting of repression and resistance. The older man has lived through it, the middle-aged man has heard about it and needs to look it up, while the young man is oblivious. Inspired by the criminalization of homosexual behaviour in Russia, India, Nigeria, and Uganda in 2013, SPANKIN revives the handkerchief code formulated during a similar period of suppression in North America…

  • Up In A Plane

    Following the life of war hero Kenneth Owen Moore, Up in a Plane transforms a granddaughter’s grief into a joyfully animated adventure through the Canadian prairies of the early 1900s, the Second World War, the present and beyond.

  • Death Of A Bathhouse

    Combining footage from the final days of St. Marc’s Spa with interviews from Toronto artists Sky Gilbert, Keith Cole, Brad Fraser, Drasko Bogdanovic and Shane MacKinnon, The Reading Salon looks at one of Toronto’s longest running bathhouses through the lens of the artist.

  • Slaughterhouse

    This multi-framed work weaves several inter-connected threads of loss: of land and agriculture, of property and business, through political, social, economic and environmental slaughter. The materials in this archive are gleaned from public and personal sources such as the National Archive of Canada, in the story of a nineteenth century aboriginal woman and land rights activist Nahnebahwequay (1824-65) and more recently organic farmer Michael Schmidt, from excerpts of the Farmer’s Advocate and Family Herald publications 1958-1968, also a trip into the artist’s familial past, and the rise and fall of his family’s slaughterhouse and pork processing plant, Hoffman Meats (1951-81),…

  • Aged

    Aged is an experimental documentary about the relationship between aging and corporeal perception. From 2005 -2011, along with my sisters, I was a caregiver for my father, during his swift movement into old age. Over this period I maintained a practice of diaristic sketching using film, video and sound, and through this process I collected a significant archive of intimate moments, at the summer cottage, where my father chose to die. This raw material has been worked and reworked through various modes of digital and filmic manipulation. Ultimately Aged uncovers the common process of aging, the cinematic elements acting as…

  • Epilogue

    Epilogue: a section or speech at the end of a book or play that serves as a comment on or a conclusion to what has happened. A trip to bury my grandmother’s ashes results in an unearthing of things long obscured by time. Imbued with unanswered questions from the Lion series, Epilogue continues the biographical inquiry of The Weight of Snow and chronicles the aftermath of a dying matriarch and a family navigating cohesion.