Film Categories: Language

  • Echolocation

    The rain in Oakland, my grandmother’s home in Baghdad, my aunts’ voices in What’s App, my daughter learning to count to 10, my brother playing the darbuka, the cicadas in Texas, the walls of my studio, the search for new forms.

  • My Canada Train Journey

    50-plus years after a memorable overnight Canadian train ride, Sandy McLennan boards regional and remote lines, with main line and public transit between them. This time shooting Double 8mm film, the same format he fell in love with while screening family home movies just for himself. What was he thinking?

  • Facing the Music

    FACING THE MUSIC:ABOUT A MAN WHO ESCAPED STALIN AND HITLER—AND PUTIN’S RESURRECTION OF BOTH STALIN AND HITLER IN UKRAINE. Wolodymyr joined the Ukrainian partisans in 1939. They were hiding cultural lead- ers who would otherwise be persecuted or murdered by Stalin. After Hitler invaded in 1941, Wolodymyr was abducted to Germany, surviving forced labour and incar- ceration in a concentration camp. Extrapolating from Wolodymyr’s story, the film shows how the atrocities he experi- enced via Stalin and Hitler have been the ‘blueprint’ for Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Putin’s Wagner Group mercenaries were named after Hitler’s favourite composer: Richard Wagner. The…

  • Abgad Hawaz

    Robin Riad’s short hand-drawn analogue film ostensibly teaches the pronunciation of the Arabic Alphabet in 28 easy steps. In actuality, the hand-drawn letters were printed using a laser jet printer onto the optical soundtrack of 16mm film, and what you hear in the film is the projector reading the letters, and interpreting them into sound. Riad uses humour to play with and sit with her mother tongue, offering a ‘false’ lesson in pronunciation. A response to a digital form of anti-Arab hate that Riad witnessed online coming out of the genocide in Gaza, Abgad Hawaz is a way for her…

  • Cha ni chinu chi’in ñu’un / Construida de tierra / Built of Earth

    Cha ni chinu chi’in ñu’un / Construida de tierra / Built of Earth is an experimental documentary project consisting of a short film, a publication, and a collaborative installation that explores the immense and ancient family home at the centre of Jamiltepec, Oaxaca, Mexico. The cavernous adobe house is in the process of being restored after a devastating earthquake that saw a portion of its roof collapse in February 2018. The short film follows the restoration process, with its focus on traditional building materials and techniques, creative reuse, and local artisanal production. In doing so, it explores the origins of…

  • xīn nī 廖芯妮

    xīn nī 廖芯妮 (“understanding you”) is an intimate auto-ethnographic portrait expressed through dance and digital technologies. Liaw engages in intergenerational conversations with her family and community to transform the linguistic divide between her Chinese name and its Hakka translation into a space for healing. Drawing on themes of decolonizing queerness to emphasize self-love and self-curiosity, the work explores both physical and technological attachments. Bodies made up of 3D-rendered cultural objects hold space for the stories of Liaw’s elders, while expanding the growing web of her ancestral knowledge. 

  • Ayesha

    An imaginary biography of my mother who, in her youth, dreamed of being a Bollywood dancer. In a lush fantasy through the heart of India, I reclaim her destiny and desires lost in another age.

  • Beat

    Caleb is a dancer. He’s also deaf. Caleb experiences music through feeling—and when he meets Thaddeus, a local musician, he begins to feel a lot. A mutual interest in music (and one another) brings the two young men together. Sometimes, love doesn’t have to be complicated.

  • UUFO

    “UUFO” consists of six short chapters/stories. Each chapter describes a memory. The film deals with conflicting interpretations of China from the 1960s onwards, contrasting past generations’ stories with my own generation’s interpretations. UUFO stands for Universal Unidentified Flying Object.

  • Nachlass

    “Nachlass” is the German word for inheritance. It is also the word for posthumously published works. Most commonly, it is used to describe all the things, both the valuables and the junk, left behind in an apartment after its inhabitant has died. In Nachlass the everyday objects of a Ukrainian immigrant to Canada function as placeholders for all of the information that has gone missing between languages and cultures in the process of immigration. However, although this story at the turn of the century is one, which must operate beyond the realm of language, its continuation today in the Germany…