Film Categories: Language

  • Work(ing Together) in Process

    On a quest to obtain some misdelivered camera batteries, Sam Koopman finds himself in a Rotterdam-based sex shop. Here he meets Marty who works there, and this chance encounter turns into a cinematic project between the two. When Sam turns the camera towards this new stranger, the two end up embarking on a year-long journey to create a film together. Their shared process of self-discovery turns this playful desktop film into a profound meditation on the nature of non-fiction film.

  • A Semiotic Square for Violent Bear

    What does our culture dream? How can we locate that dream within the logics which govern our lives? Half collage, half essay, half serious, “A Semiotic Square for Violent Bear” is a busy, referential riff on the political moment.

  • Nimer (Family)

    Nimer—meaning “family” in the Even language—follows the life of a nomadic family in Yakutia as they navigate the delicate balance between tradition and modernity. Against the backdrop of harsh northern landscapes, the film captures their resilience, the strength of ancestral bonds, and the challenges of sustaining a way of life under pressure from social and cultural change. At its heart is the mother, who embodies both continuity and adaptation, teaching her children along their seasonal migrations while preserving the customs passed down through generations. Offering an intimate portrayal of everyday survival, devotion, and hope, Nimer invites audiences into a world…

  • The Flower and The Flood

    Following the seasonal cycle of a saffron farm based in the Fraser Valley, the film explores unmechanized labor through harvesting the delicate crocus stamen by hand. After an atmospheric river decimates the flourishing saffron crop in 2021, the flood waters temporarily return Semá:th Xó:tsa to the valley more than a century after its forced draining. The film traces the interconnected history of this sacred lake with the rebuilding of the saffron crop; cultivating community and the most expensive spice in the world. Collaborating with the saffron crocus and other plants through eco-processing and analogue processes, the family garden offers us…

  • Avant Seriana

    Mom, you brought me back to our homeland. All I know about these harsh landscapes I learned from books written by the hand that burned these mountains. I try to undo the colonial myths engraved into my memory, but the hills escape my gaze. Do you think I, too, have become the white djinn spoken of by the legends surrounding our martyrs? Avant Seriana is an essay film shot in Super 8 in the Aurès region of Algeria. Observing the landscapes of my native land, I realize that they are divided into several images and times. Two different countries are…

  • I would like to visit

    An experimental short and installation work that combines text and film to explore the simple desire to travel, through the cultural and political realities of being Palestinian. Soundtracked with the anxiety of disposition, the work opts to show a close up of text being typed and edited on word-processing software, the work complicates a simple desire to travel by adding to it the social, cultural and political realities of being a Palestinian.

  • 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.

  • Toad, Leaf, Grass, Rock

    A 16mm hybrid visual poem, at the crossroad between intertextuality and documentary. This film “plays” with images in an enigmatic way. Weaving, in the words of Eugenio Montale, a disappearing and deserted suburban landscape into the fabric of images, sounds, and textures of two far away lovers yearning for each other.

  • Flamme dans l’eau

    A film exploring the poet Franck André Jamme’s journeys to Rajasthan and Nepal to seek out the origins of Tantric paintings used to awaken heightened states of consciousness. The film merges dream and legend in an exploration of these images that are made by anonymous painters, not to be bought and sold, but as tools of inner practice, as thresholds.

  • Critters Chorus, Cycle 1

    Whirring and flashing in the night sky. Wild foliage on a moist forest floor, rapidly passing by. Nervous encounters at a redwood tree, gurgling chatter with turkeys at dusk. Casually coiffed horses, unpredictable flying objects and flapping rotors. Speckled skin scrabbles, covered in lush ferns. Swirling fog, dripping haze, old man’s beard, light – diffracted. Sassy badgers, strings and figures. Critters Chorus, Cycle 1 is the first part of an ongoing project, developed while delving into unfamiliar habitats. Lead by questioning the so-called “species problem”, Truttmann investigates the (im)possibilities of taxonomic categorization of living organisms from an artistic point of…