Film Categories: media studies

  • Neighbours Walk Softly

    “‘Neighbours Walk Softly’ is an anti-war protest poem, a test of the idea of neighbourhood, and a highlighting of the dividing lines we’re only too willing to fight to defend in the inevitable times of crisis. “This Super 8 and video footage was collected in an upscale Vancouver neighbourhood over the period of one year. The act of looking through a lens caused me to realize what wasn’t there to be seen – even though there weren’t any physical walls to keep out the poor and the less beautiful, somehow they were missing from the footage I collected. “The familiar…

  • Unbreakable Bones

    A celebration of my love for my parents and of their bravery in the face of death. Footage shot from the windows of planes high above the Rocky Mountains, on trips between Winnipeg and the West Coast to visit my parents: broad metal wings equaling the heights of material invention, the dream-like hush of air travel, human endeavour sailing through blue ether. Music by Jason Tait.

  • I have no memory of my direction

    “i have no memory of my direction” is a feature-length experimental narrative. The story unfolds through a Canadian-born Japanese woman’s voice-over as she dreams her way though Japan. Ostensibly searching for an emotional connection with her aging father, the woman contemplates her own inherited culture and familial touchstones. Her North American pop-culture sensibility fuses with a distorted Japanese perspective to create a surreal interpretation of a “Japan of the imagination.” This fictional landscape is peppered with invented Japanese myths, ruminations on memory loss, the temporal space of digital photography and the ghosts of inherited imagination. DVD version available for institutional…

  • Basement Girl, The

    Abandoned by her lover, a young woman finds comfort and safety in her basement apartment. Mundane routines, a diet of junk food and the warmth of the television insulate her from the pain and betrayal of her ill-fated relationship. Eventually, The Basement Girl emerges – transformed and ready to “make it on her own.” “The Basement Girl” breaks new cinematic territory by employing multiple formats from traditional 16 mm film to toy cameras including a modified Nintendo Game Boy digital camera and the Intel Mattel computer microscope. “Midi Onodera’s latest film is a witty and wonderful meditation on how women…

  • Business as Usual

    Vision. Leadership. Expertise. Monster. Who the hell is running things anyway? Is he man or beast, machine or god? Toronto, New York, London, Tokyo – “BUSINESS AS USUAL” invites you along for a psychotic ride through the financial power capitals of the world. Witness the omnipresent executive citizen as he (it) imitates you with his bizarre rituals of behavioral dysfunction. Description – “BUSINESS AS USUAL” If a Corporation were to be embodied in a human being, how would it act? What would it do? What would it look like? Described as an art-film version of ‘The Corporation’, “BUSINESS AS USUAL”…

  • Devil Lives in Hollywood, The

    As the narrator sings of her confusion and disillusionment about the way the world is run, iconic images are presented and dismembered for both comic and unsettling effect. Conveyor-belt happy hamburgers cause heads to explode into love, flying deer are used for target practice and superman eats ice cream in his wheelchair. I’d like to share share, pretend I care but there’s no superheroes and I just don’t give a I wanna be a super model, a super model model, super model

  • Wide-Eyed

    In an awkward attempt to meet the ideal western standards of beauty, Julie, a 16-year-old Korean-Canadian, obsesses about double eyelid surgery. Her tomboy sister Jean is fascinated yet repulsed by her older sister’s serious body-image issues. Neither of them can come to any entirely comfortable sort of compromise on the right way to love each other, or themselves. Selected screenings: International Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, Germany; Visual Communications, LA, California; Giffoni Film Festival, Salerno, Italy.

  • Memo to Pic Desk

    An idiosyncratic look at staging in news photography, using materials from the archives of a Toronto daily. Moral codes, delinquency and autonomy are pulled into an altered coherence, as vintage photos are examined next to their type-written paper trail. Financial assistance provided by the Ontario Arts Council. Selected screenings & awards: Best Experimental Short Film, Lusanne Underground Film Festival, 2007; Toronto International Film Festival, 2006; Jury’s Choice Award, Black Maria Film & Video Festival, 2007; San Francisco International Film Festival, 2007; Ann Arbor Film Festival, 2007; Big Muddy Film Festival, 2007

  • Blue Box Blues (Staging a Photo Shoot)

    How long does the twinkling of an eye last? What all happens in a moment? Slap in a snap – a document of directing and a video on the half-life of still photos.

  • Hong Kong Showcase (a case study), The

    “The world is everything that is the showcase.” Living in a globalized world – a case study. (Loosely based on Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus logico-philosophicus, sentence no. 1.)