Film Categories: Memory

  • Jaddoland

    A visit to my mother’s home art studio in Texas prompts a deeper exploration into the meaning of home across generations and landscapes.

  • 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.

  • ELEMENTAL VISION or a film for the rest of my life

    “Elemental Vision or a film for the rest of my life” is ‘about’ light and time – moments captured in their passing, light events shot in various rhythmic patterns. It is about light and not particularly about the objects lit. The congruence of film’s basic properties with how we experience reality (in time/motion, through light) has been a guiding factor in my approach to filmmaking. Of course, there are people and other natural subjects filmed – incorporated -coming into view – a surprise. Intertitles mark sections, create pauses and breaks. They come from various sources suggestive of film terminology and…

  • back home

    back home follows filmmaker, Nisha Platzer’s pursuit to get to know her older brother, Josh, twenty years after he took his own life. As she connects with the friends who knew him best as a teen, a complex portrait emerges. Through intimate recollections re-imagined on Super8 and 16mm film, and lyrical images hand-processed with plants, seaweed, soil and ashes, ‘back home’ floats between memory and present time in a fragmented meditation on identity, grief and loss: illuminating the transformative power of healing in community.

  • Buses don’t stop here anymore

    Buses don’t stop here anymore is a chronicle on Super 8 of the closure, abandonment, and demolition of the Greyhound bus station in Ottawa, Canada. Once an important site for coming and going, an emotive epicenter, the camera observes the building’s erasure, dismantled by machines that writhe in the dust of demolition. Optical printing translates the act of observation into a requiem for a building, once so present and vital, now a ghost of the past. Filmed on Ektachrome Super 8 over a three year period from the sudden closure of the Greyhound station in April 2020 to its demolition…

  • Passengers

    In 2024 I decided to visit some places I had been to before, places near where I am in the present and places I’ve never been to in the past. As I travelled from here to there, filming this and that I was reminded once again that nothing stands still and nothing stays the same. One of the things that I always wondered about was the intention of the occupied places I would see and what determined the way in which they were expressed. Sometimes it seemed clear while at other times it didn’t appear clear at all. I was…

  • Precipice

    Moving images & Music: Kent Tate 4k Humans create narratives about themselves then make great effort to conform reality to that narrative. This wasn’t a threat to planetary survival 10,000 years ago when we were scattered in small bands worshiping local deities and relying on nearby gathered foodstuffs with only stone tools. It’s quite another thing when we are packed into mega-cities with nuclear weapons and ambiguous connectivity with relationships imbued in instruments that far exceed an individual’s capacity to fully comprehend or to reliably navigate our various systems. The earth spins around the sun at 30 km/sec. The habitable…

  • Trespass

    In September 2024 I went on a filming trip to southwest Saskatchewan and southeast Alberta. To get there I travelled the TransCanada Highway from my home in BC. On the way there and back I took some short stops to take a closer look at some places that appeared interesting. Often these places had restricted access or no public access at all and the longer I stopped somewhere that is not open to the public the greater the chance I would be told to leave. One such place is in the Rocky Mountains where I setup my camera outside their…

  • Symbiosis

    Occasionally I’m able to spend time in a place where I can observe how the natural world takes shape outside the anxious time frame of our hurried species. In this world relationships seem to have evolved to perpetuate balance over long periods of time as opposed to short cycles of calm interspersed with brief periods of chaos. Overruns and schedules don’t appear to exist there as they do in our manufactured world. Symbiosis is defined as a close, prolonged association between two or more different biological species. This relationship can be symbiotic (mutualistic), where both parties involved benefit from the…

  • 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.