Film Categories: Memory

  • Delight at Robert St

    Buddy, an old stray cat from Toronto, had managed to conquer a small territory of his own in the center of the city. The filmmaker met Buddy’s gaze every time she went out, she befriended her neighbor and captured his last fall with her old 35mm hand cranked movie camera.

  • Modulations

    A short film about memory, dislocation and cultural identity.

  • Atmospheric Arrivals

    This film is at once a living archive/polytemporal memory bank and a love letter to my other selves. I consider the act of revisiting my personal archives a time travelling practice and incorporating this into my films is an exercise in making said practice legible to others. “Atmospheric Arrivals” is about home and the (im)possibility of return. The “atmospheric arrival” captures a means of coming into being through memory and imagination; by reaching across spacetimes to “fetch” parts of the self that may exist in elsewheres.

  • As close as your voice can call

    A film about language, about the way trauma inflects grief, and about learning to speak with the dead. This work engages a personal archive of children’s books owned by my late mother, many of which feature her signature. I had encountered Deanna Bowen’s “sum of the parts: what can be named”  (2010), which attuned me to the lasting power of these traces, so I began to think of the signatures as a connection to my mother. I decided to use them to perform a kind of ad-hoc seance where I learned to copy her signature exactly. This forgery opened me…

  • Matin Dans Une Foret de Pins (Morning in the Pine Forest)

    The lives of six young people unfold in a journey through different worlds revealed and interwoven, where the boundaries between documentary and fiction, reality and dream cease to exist. The volatile and seductive landscape of urban and rural Latvia was treated as a rich context for the complex relationships one has with the world – inviting the viewer to come upon the questions that bind us in our common need to understand our humanness. This film is based on the lives of HELENA, EVA, JANKA, GUNTIS, ANNA and GALC.

  • Only the crow knows him / Seul le corbeau le connaît

    The misrepresentation of images through the story of an old man who lives in the street. One day he sees photographs of himself in an art gallery. He sees himself portrayed as an old homeless man. He has no history, no childhood, no mystery.

  • Over the Island

    On the island of Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, the act of leaving has become ingrained into the culture. Since the closure of its main industries, the Glace Bay coal mine and the Sydney steel plant, many young families have been forced to relocate, migrating thousands of miles in the pursuit of work. ‘Over the Island’ is an experimental documentary that follows a mother traveling back home to the island, and a filmmaker attempting to connect the past with the present. This film deconstructs the concept of ‘home’, and investigates how one’s sense of belonging, self identification and familial relationship are…

  • Glide

    * official selection Millennium Film Workshop, Brooklyn 2024 * official selection Athens Animfest – 3rd Prize Experimental Competition * official selection Les Sommets du cinema d’animation, Montreal * official selection The West Virginia Mountaineer Short Film FestivaL A meditation on the radically different means of creation available to us, Jason Zumpano’s latest short “Glide” is an invitation to the mythopoetic and the various materials, from the painterly to the digital, that bring it into existence. Against Matisse-like colour palettes and impressionistic-resolutions, the central figure of “Glide” is a woman floating on a lantern-helmed rowboat. We float through various angles and…

  • June

    June is a film diary shot on the west coast of the United States during the first few years of the twenty-first century. It is a silent visual accompaniment to my first book How to Transition on Sixty-Three Cents a Day. This hand-processed 35mm Ektachrome slide film was shot using still photographic cameras.

  • Radius

    From my perspective any place can be seen as sacred. I believe you can become so familiar with a place that you can feel the sacred in every aspect of its land, air and water. The more familiar I become with a place the more I tend to fall in love with it and in turn many of its truths are revealed. On March 31, 2022 my life partner Cheryl passed away in hospice. In April I decided to make a pilgrimage to places near our house where we enjoyed taking walks after moving to the village in October of…