Film Categories: Landscape

  • Anything Can Happen

    Nighttime. Dogs are barking in the distance. We hear motor sounds and the headlights of a car clicking on and off, and see little sceneries along the road briefly illuminated. An unseen driver connects these momentary landscapes. The headlight beams remain the only light source and actual character throughout the approximately four minutes of rhythmic imagery, in an eerie audiovisual composition. Nothing is incidental, but at any moment “Anything Can Happen”.

  • Tabula Rasa

    “Tabula Rasa” is an exploration of space both on and off the screen. As a rhythmic composition of silent white surfaces, mumbling pine trees, humming motors, babbling crows and unsettling rain in the desert, it questions the current state of its own media, but at the same time portrays a location: Smith’s Ranch Drive-in Theater, Twentynine Palms, California.

  • Tarpaulins

    The point of departure for “Tarpaulins” was a colorful disturbance on the cityscape of Los Angeles: a home in the distance festooned with a giant striped tarp. These are termite fumigation tents and filmmaker Lisa Truttmann follows their story on a two-year long investigation as she hunts down the tents, the homes, the termites inside and their traces. As the film goes on, the termites soon become our allies, guiding us through Los Angeles’ neighborhoods on their own terms. Questions of life and death, profit and loss, home and un-home, macrocosm and microcosm are brought to the fore in pursuit…

  • Pirate Bay

    “Pirate Bay” is a musical film portrait of a beach-based fishing fleet in Hastings, in south-east England. A stroll on a stormy late winter’s day leads us along the dormant boats lying on the beach at low tide. Through the rhythmic montage and a jazz composition with its fragmented tones, the tourist seaside town becomes an abandoned battlefield studded by plundered ships, recalling constant quarrels on and about the sea. A sparse dystopia by Lisa Truttmann, with music by Guido Spannocchi on alto sax, featuring Gina Schwarz on double bass.

  • Landmarks of Memory

    A tattoo ritual and hookah session memorializes a pre-war flower shop. After seeing its storefront in archival footage of the Lebanese Civil War, a first-generation daughter seeks information and connection to place. Scenes of 1976 Beirut are paired with today’s developed landscape, while roses are etched and coconut coals burn in a snowy diasporic setting.

  • Messengers

    A poetic exploration of three subterranean telescopes in remote regions of Canada, Japan, and Antarctica that reveal a new way of perceiving the universe from within. Underground, we are dreaming into the earth.

  • Second Slide

    4:10 a.m. April 29, 1903. The mining town of Frank, Alberta is awoken by ominous rumblings on Turtle Mountain.

  • Endless Thirst

    Endless Thirst is a deep dive into the otherworldly and misunderstood bog biome. Filmed in Canada, it draws attention to the harm inflicted on these ancient wetlands. An aerial view of a bog in its natural state suddenly sinks into the unimaginable, then appears to evaporate into ghostly images of Sphagnum moss (a bog’s keystone species) imprinted on 16mm film. Endless Thirst alludes to the bog’s reliance on water for survival and humanity’s unquenchable desire for resource and supply. It examines the entanglement of human and more-than-human processes that link to the climate crisis.

  • Canada in the 12th Century

    Two Canadas from the 12th Century. One real, one imaginary.

  • A Canadian Ghost Story: The Quilt for Joyce Wieland

    A Canadian Ghost Story: The Quilt for Joyce Wieland is a tribute to the films and other artwork of the late Joyce Wieland. It comprises a series of vignettes, each referencing the title of one of her films and picking up themes and motifs from her work. Two characters, A and B, are engaged in a somewhat mysterious and arduous endeavour surrounding Wieland’s films. Their memories of Wieland are stitched into a tale that is being told in a time of uncertainty and looming danger. The piece explores artistic legacy, particularly in a feminist and Canadian context, with some of…