Film Categories: Mortality

  • Heavy Petting

    A lonely young woman scrambling to fill the void left by a missing household pet forges a strange and tenuous bond with an unexpected visitor role-playing in a cat costume. When the animal returns, the visitor is discarded and returns to life of profound solitude and invisibility, which inspires a macabre test of their social obscurity.

  • Last Light Breaking

    Words on stone monuments, floating through the frame, suggest that origin always has a powerful, lived base. Deeply charged images seem possessed by the memory of those who have passed through. This experimental film is an examination of the ties that have formed beyond the last light.

  • Bye Bye Now

    When people wave hello to the person behind the camera in home movies they seem aware of waving hello to a future viewer. Yet, upon viewing, the very gesture (re)presents a recurring good-bye to a fleeting moment. This film is an homage to the man behind the camera in these personal 8mm family archives, my father, who left me this heritage beyond mortality in the traces of past lives. — Louise Bourque Review : “BYE BYE NOW is cruel. A movie traumatized by time, which is the passing of time and all that inhabits it. Movies play into that, their…

  • Momently Gone

    Momently Gone is a dive into the interiority, in the form of five video-poems, declining, like a theme with variations, the relationship to our missing ones. It was inspired by the mourning of two of my sisters, both of whom committed suicide, and that of my father, who died of cancer. This common thread gave birth to a set of works that is soothing rather than challenging, because there is sweetness in feeling close to those who are absent, there is sweetness in gathering around a universal reality. Thanks to digital tools, I work with layers of images and sound…

  • Personal Growth

    A short venture into personal growth, the process of surrendering and the ability to release.

  • How amazingly unlikely is your birth

    What could a cosmology of one person’s life look like? A daughter examines the life and premature death of her father, who had a troubled relationship with the psychiatric medical establishment and was passionate about ecology, politics and space travel.

  • The Day Stashi Ran Out of Honey

    An old man, a village, a potato field in bloom, and the sudden appearance of war on your doorstep. The Day Stashi Ran Out of Honey creates a haunting visual collage of kate 1930’s Poland, blending historical reality with one grandfather’s recollection of a fateful day.

  • All Us Choir Boys

    Peter has not left his apartment in two years and spends most of his time in video chat rooms. He fears that Dylan, an online hookup, has met a violent end. Day after day he hunts for the file of their last video chat so he can send it to the police. Vernon, a love interest from Peter’s former choir, wants him to get over his obsession and attend Vernon’s solo choir debut. Meanwhile, Peter’s therapist encourages him to explore past trauma rather than online fantasy. When Peter finds the file, he is shocked to his core. Now he must…

  • 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…

  • 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…