Film Categories: Landscape

  • Off World

    Two million tonnes of waste inhabit the landfill known as Smokey Mountain in Manila, Philippines. A squatter community of more than 30,000 people live in the slums around the landfill, and make their living by picking through the decomposing mountain of trash, looking for rare valuables. This is the setting for director Mateo Guez’s raw, ethereal first feature film. “Off World” follows a young Toronto man, Lucky, as he returns to Smokey Mountain for the first time since his adoption by Canadian parents when he was just a year old. Aided by NGO worker, Julia, Lucky tracks down his surviving…

  • Basin

    The forest and river awaken to a new day; the hum of the highway is constant. This is a boom town. An oil town. But what of it? An environmental scourge, or an economic miracle? … Just look. And listen. Selected Screenings: Hot Docs 2010 (Toronto, ON); Inside Out LGBT Festival, 2010 (Toronto, ON); Out on Screen, 2010 (Vancouver, BC)

  • Nightlight

    A lovely time-lapse portrait of landscapes and people at night, featuring both loneliness and connection and ending with a fireworks display. “Nightlight” was shot on expired black-and-white Double Super 8 film and processed as negative, the gelatin layer of the film stained red. Jury Award, Dresdner Schmalfilmtage / Dresden Small Format Festival 2010

  • View From Here, The

    Travel is often the ultimate test of a relationship. In “The View From Here”, the filmmaker combines travel footage of picturesque Europe with journal entries, to provide insight into a relationship that’s on a seemingly downward spiral. Winner of Alabama Shout Film Festival award for Excellence in Storytelling.

  • All That Sheltering Emptiness

    “All That Sheltering Emptiness” is a meditation on elevators, hotel lobbies, hundred dollar bills, the bathroom, a cab, chandeliers, cocktails, the receptionist, arousal, and other routines in the life of a New York City callboy. Gorgeously hand-processed in full 16mm glory, this film is a collaboration between Gina Carducci (Stone Welcome Mat) and Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore (author of So Many Ways to Sleep Badly; editor of That’s Revolting! Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation). “All That Sheltering Emptiness” explodes the typical narratives of desire, escape and intimacy to evoke something more honest.

  • Riding Along

    “A month’s wandering, hitch-hiking towards Eastern Europe with a few rolls of 16mm film, a microphone and an old Bolex camera. An intuitive recollection of sounds and images from the journey’s chance meetings and landscapes. One conviction leads me on these roads: different forms of assocation between sound and image are possible. The recording device is at the heart of the encounters as the emotional barometer of an atypical journey. From car to car, the film unfolds and finds its way, slowly drawing a self-portrait.” – Sébastien Demeffe

  • Delphinium: A Childhood Portrait of Derek Jarman

    “Delphinium: A Childhood Portrait of Derek Jarman” is a stylized and lyrical coming-of-age portrait of Derek Jarman’s artistic, sexual, and political awakening in post-War England. Part biographical narrative, part experimental collage, part personal meditation on the most controversial and important modern British artist and activist, the film finds in Jarman’s childhood the stirrings of creative and individual epiphany that inspired a remarkable life. Written and directed by Matthew Mishory, the film was shot in Super 8 and HD by cinematographer Lili Wilde and features an original score by Arban and Steven Severin of Siouxsie and the Banshees and The Glove.…

  • Tracking Sasquatch (field report #1)

    A search for the elusive Sasquatch. The first chapter in an ongoing series.

  • brouillard #1

    Thirty-two passages from a small path in the woods towards the edge of a lake are layered onto one another.

  • Blue

    “Blue” serves as the filmmaker’s exploration of the sights, sounds, form, and function of the historical Johnson Street Bridge in Victoria, BC. Built in 1924 as a bascule-style drawbridge, designed by the same company that would later build the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, “Big Blue” is currently at a politically controversial crossroads. After sitting for years in dire need of seismic upgrades and maintenance, Victoria city council pressed forth with an expensive plan for demolition and replacement. While citizens fought back with a petition, which forced a referendum, demolition remains the official course of action. Also presented as…