Film Categories: Memory

  • Vampires Drink Blood… I Drink Sorrow

    A love story at the end of time.

  • C’est à qui, cette ville?

    “C’est à qui, cette ville?” is a response to the 1984 film, “Ville, Quelle Ville?” This original super 8 film documented various places in Toronto’s east end and reflected upon a young woman’s life in the city. 38 years later, “C’est à qui, cette ville?” revisits many of the same locations and contemplates a more mature perspective on urban living. This film was shot on outdated super 8 stock which gives the image a patina of time passing. Musical score by Montreal-based artist and composer, Jackie Gallant.

  • ATALAYA

    “Atalaya” means watchtower in Spanish. It’s also the name of the Chilean islands where, in 1998, debris was found from the boat belonging to the filmmaker’s seafaring father, Gerry Roufs, lost at sea. It’s also a key word of the book written by her mother, Michèle Cartier, which recounts the search she undertook to find him. ATALAYA is the filmmaker’s pilgrimage to Cape Horn, camera in hand, memories flowing through her mind; an essay on her reflections on that inescapable grief, on how memory is affected by the presence of absence, and on how life naturally follows its course. Short…

  • Carasoul: a Portrait in Nth Dimensions

    Carasoul: a Portrait in Nth Dimensions is an animated surrealist 4K film. The film depicts temporal, immaterial sensations and perceptions as spatially material extensions of the body. This vision of invisible dimensions within a human experience is grounded in biological and biographical forms. This work is for feeling thoughts around you like waves and forms, invisible yet tangible. One named experience is the Carasoul, the head-soul moving like a merry-go-round. It’s the imagination, the mind’s eye, the visuospatial sketchpad of the psyche surrounding the body. The Carasoul questions how one experiences time, the location and duration of consciousness, the life…

  • Arrival 1, Arrival 2

    This experimental essay film springs from the final days of December 2020 when I moved from Chicago to Toronto. The film documents my move and then continues on alternate paths, weaving through the liminal spaces of borders, sickness, interpellation, and dreams. Content Note: This film contains extended discussions about fatphobia and disordered eating. Specifically, this film contains descriptions of food restriction, idealization of thinness, and intense emotional and physical pain after eating. After 11:41 there is no direct discussion of disordered eating. Flashing lights throughout. Loud noises throughout.

  • Tell Me about SunTea

    Tell Me about SunTea (Super 8, Digital Video, Colour, Stereo Sound, 6 minutes and 47 seconds) Tell Me about SunTea builds a conversational and spatial ecosystem, weaving together the disparate spaces of the Toronto Islands and Covington, Texas. The film considers the life cycles of plants and animals, as discussed by the filmmaker’s Gram and as remembered by the filmmaker. Conversational obstacles and a failed interview attempt are re-imagined as off-road opportunities. The repeated voice over reveals changes in cadence and content that point to the fragile intimacy held in language and storytelling. “Considering different forms of mechanical and organic…

  • Nautilus

    Unlike its close relative the octopus, the Nautilus has a poor memory and yet it has managed to exist for half a billion years. Our ancestors have been on Earth for about six million years, while modern humans evolved in the last 200,000. Civilization as it is generally understood today began approximately 6,000 years ago, and the industrialization of the natural world began its accelerating trajectory in the past two centuries. According to fossil records the chambered Nautilus has remained fundamental unchanged for about five hundred million years. What I wonder will the records show of our presence on planet…

  • Isolated Gestures

    With Isolated Gestures I am primarily concerned with exploring the interplay of sunlight and shadows with weather as the narrative. The story for me is in how light contrasts the absence of light in shaping forms within a given frame of time and space. I generally gravitate towards places that reveal the many layers of time, stimulating reflections on all the different life forms that may have existed in a particular location where I have set up my camera and tripod. This is when I imagine worlds that have passed, worlds that are present, and worlds that are yet to…

  • The Sun comes out at Night

    During a severe thunderstorm in Saskatchewan, Canada Buckminster Fuller* appears, disappears, then re-appears in a gas station parking lot discussing World War I, the shift from animal/human power to the machine, as well as the law of thermodynamics and evolution. If I were a futurist, I would predict that the world Buckminster Fuller describes in the 20th Century, or the world we are familiar with today in the early 21st Century will be a very different world in the 22nd Century. Acquiring energy is the core concern of all living entities such as photosynthesis, or vegetable/animal matter. Along with water…

  • A Tree Gets in the Way

    We are a determined species. We make plans and calculate in advance how to accomplish a goal. These calculations are not always completely accurate wherein something unanticipated can occur. On a warm spring day, I saw this house on a truck being moved to an empty lot. It looked like it would take maybe a half hour to position the house. That was until its progress was prevented by a tree in the corner of the lot. This delayed the operation until the tree could be removed.