Film Categories: Memory

  • The World in Ten Blocks

    Welcome to Bloorcourt, one of Toronto’s most diverse neighbourhoods. Small business owners from all over the world have made this one of the most vibrant parts of Toronto. Meet some of these immigrant entrepreneurs and hear about their dreams, struggles, victories, and the unexpected ways in which they’ve changed. An intimate journey into the kitchens and behind the counters of small businesses where cultures and traditions are preserved, shared, and evolve.

  • Sum (Heart)

    Based on ideas of Zen Buddhism and rooted in the 7 Grandfather teachings, Sum (Heart) is a rumination on death, grief and letting go. Starting out as a visual mourning song to Wendy Babcock, Mr Toqui Wong and Jack, empty landscapes represent the yearning for the company of dead friends. Water becomes a metaphor for grief and mourning, the ebbs and flows of nature reminds us of the cycle of life which transforms into a stark ode to a new day and new beginnings. I put all my sadness, prayers and hope into this trilogy while still aching for their…

  • The Burning Desire in a Dollar Bill

    The Burning Desire in a Dollar Bill shows how the special interests of media conglomerates and their parent companies mould our latent desires at a young age, later leaving us confused as to whether we are lusting after the sexually charged imagery or the products being advertised. The film argues that the act of purchasing is the strongest aphrodisiac in a capitalist society, leaving open the possibility that a solution to toppling capitalism is to shift our sexual desires from consumerism to personal freedom from the state. The film was created during a residency at Signal Culture using a modified…

  • Arvind

    After his mentally ill mother is released from prison, Arvind, a 16 year-old biracial queer teenager in Austin, Texas, revisits old family wounds when he writes and produces a play written from his mother’s perspective. When his relationship with the actress who portrays his mother on stage deepens, it sets Arvind on a course that will change his perception of his past.

  • If I Were Any Further Away I’d Be Closer to Home

    A silent poem reflecting on the place of my mother’s birth and her first traces on earth. A generational portrait of South Asian “makers” becomes a perceptual voyage into memory, experience, and touch.

  • Cruising Elsewhere

    Whatever happened to Wohler Beach? Oral histories and spectral pornography resurrect memories of a once legendary gay beach. “Cruising Elsewhere” won the Jury Award for Best Short Film at the 2017 Tampa Bay International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival. “CRUISING ELSEWHERE is a formally daring – and thoroughly embodied – exploration of gay desire and the utopian possibility of that desire existing unabashedly in public.” – Jules Rosskam

  • 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.

  • 8401

    8401 is a moving-image and light landscape painting depicting a multi-layered, fragmented view of Villa Grimaldi in Santiago, Chile. Now a memorial park, Villa Grimaldi was a clandestine detention, torture and extermination centre during the Pinochet regime (1973-90). The image is built of hundreds of images extracted from five years of Google Street Views of the address and site, Avenida José Arrieta 8401.The sound is composed of fifteen audio loops of ambient sound and voice, deconstructed from a field recording gathered during a 2016 tour of the facility. A multitude of shifting perspectives give the impression both of deprioritizing time…

  • Ghost Copy

    A flock of birds; an airplane; a soldier turns his head; a child sprints towards the camera. These four settings, and the many that follow in the next two-and-a-half minutes, each last a split second, a handful frames – just long enough fo rmoving forms to become perceptible as shapes, gestures, artefacts. in-between is darkness. The form of Ghost Copy is owed to a double work with the archive: The moving images are taken from Austrian amateur films from 1935 to 1965. The staccato of clips and black frames is sythesised with the compositional principle of the 8 mm film…

  • RUPTURE

    By and large humans tend to create narratives about themselves, then often make great effort to conform reality to that narrative. This was not a threat to planetary survival 10,000 years ago when we were scattered in small bands worshipping local deities and relying on nearby gathered foodstuffs with only stone tools. It is quite an other thing when we are packed into mega-cities with nuclear weapons and ambiguous connectivities, along with relationships imbued in instruments that far exceed an individual’s capacity to fully comprehend or to realibly navigate our various systems. Sequence in order of appearance: Secret Bunker –…