Film Categories: Nature

  • Fevered

    ‘Fevered’ is a meditation on the heated drama enacted by lakes and rivers as winter unravels. Piecing together 16mm footage and sound recordings, Peters re-imagines the pulsing of waterways as a metaphorical rhizome swelling outward in a feverish response to global warming.

  • Dam’d

    Using 16mm film altered in part by algae and zebra mussels, ‘Dam’d’ illuminates parallel behaviours between human and invasive species and their impact on waterways. The mutation of film footage acts as a metaphor for the erosion and evolution of the aquatic ecosystems it records.

  • Shifting Baseline

    Motion picture film decomposes in a bath of toxic cyanobacteria collected from a shore where children are playing. A child’s piano improvisation plays over the bacterial impressions in memory of a fleeting moment. ‘Shifting Baseline’ combines ecological and filmic processes to capture and animate an environment that is rapidly slipping away.

  • Meltwater

    Meltwater is an icy terrain that dissolves into sweeping waves of shadows. Blurring the horizon between the real and the imagined, the possible and the unthinkable, this vision is a meditation on global warming and its havoc on the rhythms of the natural world. In addition to festival presentation, Meltwater can be played as a seamless, infinite loop in a single or multi-channel installation.

  • Hag’s Taper

    The many names of the herb mullein include hag’s taper, Jupiter’s rod, flannel leaf, velvet plant, felt-wort, tinder plant, candlewick plant, witch’s candle, lady’s foxglove, candlewick plant, torches, cowboy toilet paper, and more. Brought by European settlers to what is now known as Canada over 250 years ago, mullein is native to parts of Europe and Asia. The introduced plant was valued for its medicinal abilities and its use as a fish poison. Today, it is considered a noxious weed in so-called Alberta. This video was shot in the Crowsnest Pass, Alberta where mullein thrives in the disturbed sites including…

  • Behemoth (six legs good, two legs bad)

    Behemoth (six legs good, two legs bad) is an animated film featuring six bee genera. Made using animated stills, Super-8 and 16mm footage, optical printing, and cameraless techniques.

  • Pappy’s Garden

    A personal tribute to the filmmaker’s grandfather, a first-generation immigrant to Toronto, Canada from Jamaica in the 1950s. Through both digital and super 8mm found family footage, Mike’s past catches up with him as he struggles with difficult memories from his childhood in Jamaica, finding comfort in his spectacularly over-grown garden.

  • Wherefrom the Shadows That Are Forms Fall

    The film is set amongst the eroding, forested cliffs of a creek. The images are a direct response to Linsey Wellman’s soundtrack of layered saxophones and electronics, which filmmaker Matthieu Hallé listened to for the first time while exposing each frame.

  • Island Cowboy

    Island Cowboy is a documentary that follows a Canadian beekeeper on Prince Edward Island during one of his last years of work. At the age of 68, Stan Sandler would like to retire, but impending threats to his island home’s ecosystem threaten the future of the bees, and the health of the environment. The relationship between a beekeeper’s labour and the economy of the island’s blueberry crop is explored through a season of beekeeping, as we get an intimate look at Stan and the “bee cowboys”.

  • Presque Vu

    Lush hand-crafted film footage and HD images combine to reveal a mysterious past through remnants of a memory that is almost remembered, but which never fully develops. Language note: Presque Vu is without language or dialogue. There are words spoken in a mysterious language, but they are not intended to be understood.