Film Categories: Landscape

  • Golden Boat

    Inside a derelict warehouse in the middle of a salt pan, people from around the world are waiting to be taken to a mysterious place that promises a better life. Some find the wait intolerable, desperate to leave and to explore the imagined possibilities on the other side. For others, the house offers a momentary respite from a troubled past and the difficult migrant life that awaits them in the future.

  • Without Consent

    “Without Consent” weaves a young woman’s personal account of forced adoption in Australia in the late 1960s. It recounts the legal climate that outcast young unmarried women who were pregnant during these years, the systemized abuse they endured in the name of God as well as the stories they hid.

  • 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…

  • RUPTURE

    By and large humans tend to create narratives about themselves, then often make great effort to conform reality to that narrative. This was not a threat to planetary survival 10,000 years ago when we were scattered in small bands worshipping local deities and relying on nearby gathered foodstuffs with only stone tools. It is quite an other thing when we are packed into mega-cities with nuclear weapons and ambiguous connectivities, along with relationships imbued in instruments that far exceed an individual’s capacity to fully comprehend or to realibly navigate our various systems. Sequence in order of appearance: Secret Bunker –…

  • Catalyst

    Being natural born pattern seekers, we are forever looking for this or that clue to help explain what otherwise might appear unfathomable. Fundamentally Catalyst represents a type of diary without dates, of memories reconstructed to formulate my story. A story that takes place in time and space, shaped by the earth and sky Merging super 8 mm footage that I filmed many years ago with some of my more recent DSLR/HDV tape footage, Catalyst investigates how each medium shaped my story as well as the gaps in time when each sequence was filmed. Filmed on location by Kent Tate: Toronto,…

  • Soy un ser cuyas raíces // I am a being whose roots

    Soy un ser cuyas raíces // I am a being whose roots reworks Jacques Madvo’s Countries & People: Venezuela to explore labour and migration. Taking the final words of the film’s voice-over as a starting point, Soy un ser cuyas raíces // I am a being whose roots pairs Madvo’s film footage with a text-based conversation with young Venezuelan literature scholar and language teacher Angel Said Dominguez Pinto. Dominguez Pinto relocated to Panama in 2014 to make a living teaching English, Spanish & German in Panama City after Venezuela’s economic collapse. Over e-mail, we co-authored a conversational text, exploring migration,…

  • The Exile (Pituvahalaya)

    Shot improvisationally in 2010, shortly after the end of the Sri Lankan civil war, this film takes a lyrical approach to examining recent history and the process of reconstruction in the post-war era. The visions of an exile are carried through an immoral silence, to an end both dubious and bittersweet. World premiere at 64th Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, 2018

  • Inventory

    Often the very things that appear to enable a sense of security, stability, and status can be disrupted, or rendered obsolete, destined to become a memory, or simply just forgotten. On the other hand, things that frame our passions while informing our dreams have the very real potential of retaining their meaning, regardless of any actual or imagined externalities. Before leaving home last July to begin an artist residency I went to pick up a couple of things at a nearby big box store only to discover that it had been closed. A crew was removing all the signs on…

  • Velocity

    I generally gravitate towards places that reveal the many layers of time when deciding on a particular location to set up my camera and tripod. This is when I like to imagine worlds that have passed, worlds that are present, and worlds that are yet to be. In 2009 Johan Rockström led the team which developed the “Planetary Boundaries Framework,” a set of 9 boundaries that they define as a “safe operating space for humanity.” These scientists assert that once certain thresholds or tipping points are passed there is a risk of “irreversible and abrupt environmental change.” In 1976 a…

  • Landscape With Shipwreck: First Person Cinema and the Films of Philip Hoffman

    Edited by Karyn Sandlos and Mike Hoolboom Philip Hoffman has been making personal documentary films for over twenty years. He has devoted his life to examining the narrow aperture each of us uses to bring our own experience into focus. As many of the writers in this volume will attest, telling personal stories is dangerous work. “Landscape with Shipwreck” is an untidy stew of gravediggers and critics, architects and builders. In their conversion of pictures into words, each has used the history of their own naming as compass and guide. These photographs and scripts speak alongside the written word, not…