Film Categories: Identity

  • Father Knows Father Best

    Utilizing damaged film loops and photograms, “Father Knows Father Best” plays off an old found-footage print of the American situation comedy to highlight a dysfunctional family paradigm. Malcolm Goldstein’s experimental violin soundings exploit the atonal dialogue.

  • Alia

    Haunted by the memory of civil war, an old Lebanese man revisits the last few moments of a fateful bus ride that leads up to the murder of his beloved.

  • Deema

    After years of living abroad, Deema is reunited with her childhood friend Nidal. When their love blossoms like the Arab Spring, a pain nested deep within suddenly re-surfaces as she fights to revive the phoenix inside of her.

  • Cherry Cola

    After Ryan receives an abrupt message ending his two year relationship, he and his fellow drag sister, Nick, partake on a drunken adventure for resolution. Moving through the city with night as their fuel, both queens are forced to reflect on the life they live, and the people who can’t seem to keep up.

  • Emergence

    “Emergence” is a video installation created to counter the violence of blackface in its representation of Blackness. This piece re-asserts the beauty of Blackness and challenges the reductive nature of contemporary Canadian blackface through extreme close-ups of black faces in all their diversity. Shot in extreme slow motion and projected by two projectors at a large scale on two screens, the images appear to be stills at first, but reveal themselves over time to be moving. These parts of lips, noses, eyes, posit the face as a signifying landscape. Serene images contrast with others that depict faces and arms pressed…

  • Soft Core

    Two bridesmaids form an unlikely connection over their bizarre sexual awakenings.

  • Video Home System

    ‘Video Home System’ traces the convergence of popular culture and politics in Pakistan during the 1980s and 1990s. This video showcases the connections between pop culture and nationalism, and how bootleg economies kept the cinema industry alive during periods of censorship. Image description: A young man sits at a desk behind a pile of VHS tapes, illuminated by a desk lamp. The wall behind him is vivid green.

  • POLYMORPH

    Through the lens of an experimental film this personal piece explores gender and one’s place within or without it. Using images of their body and sonographic visuals set to drone music, the director leads you through an identity in flux.

  • SHE IS THE OTHER GAZE

    Every encounter with an image, every interaction searches for its own form. SHE IS THE OTHER GAZE describes the encounter with female visual artists mostly of an older generation who were part of the Viennese art scene in the 1970s and were engaged in the women’s movement. In dialogue with the filmmaker and her camera they share early works and artistic practices. They remember how their self-determination evolved between artistic ambitions, economic constraints, adaptation and resistance to the prevailing patriarchal social structures. In their role as feminist pioneers the protagonists are a great influence on the contemporary art scene and…