Film Categories: Nature

  • Avant Seriana

    Mom, you brought me back to our homeland. All I know about these harsh landscapes I learned from books written by the hand that burned these mountains. I try to undo the colonial myths engraved into my memory, but the hills escape my gaze. Do you think I, too, have become the white djinn spoken of by the legends surrounding our martyrs? Avant Seriana is an essay film shot in Super 8 in the Aurès region of Algeria. Observing the landscapes of my native land, I realize that they are divided into several images and times. Two different countries are…

  • Egg is a Cracked Moon

    In a post-disaster volcanic landscape, a solitary stonemason moves rocks in quiet ritual, responding to his inner terrain as imagination and land converge.

  • Western Brook Pond

    A boat trip through Western Brook Pond, an ancient fjord in Newfoundland’s Long Range Mountains, carved out over millions of years by tectonic activity and glaciers. Western Brook Pond was shot on video and 16 mm film, which was hand processed with apples and coloured with turmeric and walnuts. Note: Contains strobe effects.

  • Epitaph

    Epitaph is an examination of site and memory. It follows the effects of plate tectonics on the landscape of Chile – the filmmaker’s birthplace – and the small and large cycles of destruction and rebuilding the ever-present earthquakes trigger. Filmed in both Chile and on the Tablelands in Canada, a site central to the modern understanding of plate tectonics, Epitaph incorporates eco-processed 16 mm footage, video, documents from public and private archives, and found footage to weave an epitaph to a home in the process of leaving the filmmaker, first as a result of exile and then to the gradual…

  • People On Sunday

    People on Sunday is filmed using the technology of hand-crancked cinematograph camera invented by the Lumière brothers’. The instability and volatility of the image produced by the filming technique characterizes Viita´s film which title refers to the German classic Menchen am Sonntag (1930) – a well-known example of how history and the passage of time affect the interpretation of film. The inexorable passage of time and the beautiful fragility of life are central themes in both films. Does man learn anything from history, or are we doomed to make the same mistakes over and over again? People on Sunday presents…

  • The Flower and The Flood

    Following the seasonal cycle of a saffron farm based in the Fraser Valley, the film explores unmechanized labor through harvesting the delicate crocus stamen by hand. After an atmospheric river decimates the flourishing saffron crop in 2021, the flood waters temporarily return Semá:th Xó:tsa to the valley more than a century after its forced draining. The film traces the interconnected history of this sacred lake with the rebuilding of the saffron crop; cultivating community and the most expensive spice in the world. Collaborating with the saffron crocus and other plants through eco-processing and analogue processes, the family garden offers us…

  • PATH

    Employing a simple three-part structure, “PATH” is about personal experience and the interpretation of that experience. Both humorous and serious, the film is a cross-Toronto exploration, expansively taking in a wide variety of people, events and situations. In creating a dynamic web of associations, “PATH” invites participation in the act of perception. The film’s structure works like this: Davis is filmed connecting dots on a street map; next she walks that distance on the street, filming as she goes; then she recalls and interprets what she has seen in memory sequences. The street sequences have a variety of different rhythms…

  • Nimer (Family)

    Nimer—meaning “family” in the Even language—follows the life of a nomadic family in Yakutia as they navigate the delicate balance between tradition and modernity. Against the backdrop of harsh northern landscapes, the film captures their resilience, the strength of ancestral bonds, and the challenges of sustaining a way of life under pressure from social and cultural change. At its heart is the mother, who embodies both continuity and adaptation, teaching her children along their seasonal migrations while preserving the customs passed down through generations. Offering an intimate portrayal of everyday survival, devotion, and hope, Nimer invites audiences into a world…

  • Reruns of the Glow and Noise

    A pail of soil, spread on plastic, becoming grains of light.

  • Leaves Like Feathers

    Leaves Like Feathers A neo-Impressionist film. A painterly film. Leaves Like Feathers was shot mostly with an iPhone Pro Max manipulated to blow out the backgrounds (sunlight) to white, and cause foreground subjects to materialize, dissolve, flash, and ‘morph’ into the light—when shot with a moving camera. The subjects are plants, mostly ferns, which are sometimes described as having ‘leaves like feathers.’ This quote came to mind while I was shooting the film: Having condensed his vision to a small area of the surface of his own lily pond, Claude Monet realized that the fragment could indeed suggest not merely…