Film Categories: history

  • The World in Ten Blocks

    Welcome to Bloorcourt, one of Toronto’s most diverse neighbourhoods. Small business owners from all over the world have made this one of the most vibrant parts of Toronto. Meet some of these immigrant entrepreneurs and hear about their dreams, struggles, victories, and the unexpected ways in which they’ve changed. An intimate journey into the kitchens and behind the counters of small businesses where cultures and traditions are preserved, shared, and evolve.

  • Mino-bimaadiziwin (The Good Life)

    Mino-bimaadiziwin (The Good Life) came out of the Artist for Film residency at Artscape Gibraltar Point. I was excited about First Story’s walking tour with Elder Carolyn King. I was only able to participate with the aid of a wheelchair and allow others to push me around, it was my first time in a wheelchair. I documented this walk from that perspective with this manual timelapse on Super 8. Reconciling myself as a mixed-race indigenous Colombian settler “walking the red road” while being a person who lives with physical disabilities. Learning to live mino-bimaadiziwin as a settler to Turtle Island…

  • Lunch Time

    In this film we drive through downtown Cairo. While exploring the urban life and daily routine of the streets near Tahrir square, we sink into a labyrinth where our path keeps on being cut. During the 2011 revolution it was often said that “the people took back the streets”, but since then the police and military have returned to power and show their supremacy by controlling the public spaces, leaving many to adapt to a system where they have no voice and must work around the obstacles that are left behind.

  • Fire and Fury

    Montreal, 1734. A tragic event forever changes the life of a slave and of the entire city. A mystery where love, secrets and betrayal collide.

  • The Spectre Watches Over Her

    A reaction to the seminal text by Swiss anthropologist Paul Wirz entitled Exorcism and the Art of Healing in Ceylon, this high contrast hand processed film considers a history of colonialism and ethnographic practices in South Asia. At my mother’s village, I re-staged an exorcism once performed on her in the early 1960s when she was a little girl. Possessed by the lecherous entity known as the Kalu Kumara, the Sanni Yakuma healing ritual was performed over a 12-hour period.

  • Cruising Elsewhere

    Whatever happened to Wohler Beach? Oral histories and spectral pornography resurrect memories of a once legendary gay beach. “Cruising Elsewhere” won the Jury Award for Best Short Film at the 2017 Tampa Bay International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival. “CRUISING ELSEWHERE is a formally daring – and thoroughly embodied – exploration of gay desire and the utopian possibility of that desire existing unabashedly in public.” – Jules Rosskam

  • 8401

    8401 is a moving-image and light landscape painting depicting a multi-layered, fragmented view of Villa Grimaldi in Santiago, Chile. Now a memorial park, Villa Grimaldi was a clandestine detention, torture and extermination centre during the Pinochet regime (1973-90). The image is built of hundreds of images extracted from five years of Google Street Views of the address and site, Avenida José Arrieta 8401.The sound is composed of fifteen audio loops of ambient sound and voice, deconstructed from a field recording gathered during a 2016 tour of the facility. A multitude of shifting perspectives give the impression both of deprioritizing time…

  • Ghost Copy

    A flock of birds; an airplane; a soldier turns his head; a child sprints towards the camera. These four settings, and the many that follow in the next two-and-a-half minutes, each last a split second, a handful frames – just long enough fo rmoving forms to become perceptible as shapes, gestures, artefacts. in-between is darkness. The form of Ghost Copy is owed to a double work with the archive: The moving images are taken from Austrian amateur films from 1935 to 1965. The staccato of clips and black frames is sythesised with the compositional principle of the 8 mm film…

  • Older Than What?

    Aging has a tendency to fade people out of the picture. Older Than What? brings LGBTQ elders sharply back into focus with humor, frankness, wit and charm. 12 seniors answer 10 questions about aging and share stories about how they made history. International Short Film Competition, Asterisco Festival Internationciale de Cine LGBTIQ, Buenos Aires, 2017 (Juried) Gold Award, Documentary Category, South Georgian Bay Film Festival, Collingwood, Canada, 2018 (Jury & Audience votes) Audience Award, Best Documentary Short, Cineffable, Paris, France, 2018 Audience Award, Best Short, USNExpo, Sardinia Queer Short Film Fest, Sardinia, Italy, 2018 2nd Place, Audience Award, Best Short,…

  • Potamkin

    In 1933, at age 33, Harry Alan Potamkin died of complications related to starvation, at a time when he was one of the world’s most respected film critics. In his writings, he advocated for a cinema that would simultaneously embrace the fractures and polyphony of modern life and the equitable social vision of left radical politics. This film-biography is assembled out of distorted fragments of films on which he had written, an impression of erupting consciousness. At the Odessa steps, trampling gives breath to the child. The bullet miraculously reforms the face. The Cossacks march backwards, retreating unseen into their…