Film Categories: Nature

  • Transit – Destination

    Cities are where people tend to nest. This is where we can engage in the greatest range of pursuits while being provided a reasonable likelihood of day to day sustenance. While not apparent for the most part, cities require far flung resources making them islands or something akin to a space station. Cities are also de facto barriers for many other animal species, especially those that require migration routes to survive. Note: The voices are Kent Tate and a friendly passerby engaging in a conversation about birds while he was filming some office towers.

  • Salt River Water Walk

    In February 2020, Sharon Day (Ojibwe) led a group of Water Walkers through the Arizona desert to walk for the Salt River. Through animation and live footage, this documentary travels with the Salt River Water Walkers, describing this Indigenous-led ceremony as it creates community and builds relationships with the earth through the shared goal to care for the water. The project was organized by the Museum of Walking. The film was made possible through the Museum of Walking, the Institute for Desert Humanities at Arizona State University, and Indigenous People’s Task Force.

  • Exercises for Being Close to You: A Story for the Arctic Refuge

    Exercises for Being Close to You is an experimental documentary that follows a group of hikers through Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The team is in search of the Porcupine Caribou herd in hopes of collecting stories that could help push back on oil exploration and drilling on the caribou’s birthing grounds. The narrator, admitting to a perverse desire to be close to everything, wants nothing more than to spoon a caribou. As the film culminates in anticipation of the “money shot”, the audience is pushed to evaluate its expectations of nature films. Meanwhile, the expedition team is left to…

  • До Землі (To the Ground)

    A three-channel video installation which depicts various plants from Saskatchewan that were captured during my year-long mentorship with Sandra Semchuk (supported by BC Arts Council). The project applies the approach of ethnobotany, in this case combining stories of both Ukrainian and Ukrainian Canadian people about the medicinal use of different plants. The video triptych pairs close-ups of plants together with audio stories about them, giving an inside view of an interwoven connection between Ukrainian people and plants, while at the same time unveiling the history of immigration through individual family stories. By including both English and Ukrainian language the work…

  • sway / pull

    Created during the COVID-19 pandemic when queer spaces were disappearing across Toronto, sway / pull is a meditation on the erosion of Hanlan’s point beach in both literal and figurative senses. Hanlan’s Point Beach, located on the Toronto Islands, was the site of Toronto first gay pride celebrations in 1970s and remains a queer haven today. Additionally, the Toronto Islands have faced poor city planning that has led to a significant amount of erosion on the beach. This film plays with the concept of erosion by the physical pushing of sand to speak back to the literal erosion of the…

  • temporal assemblages

    temporal assemblages is an ecological video poem exploring human presence and absence in natural and built environments. Although the performers in the film are directed within the frame, the locations serve as canvasses for improvisation and the landscape is an equal player in the narrative of the scene. A meditation on impermanence and the transience of place, the title is inspired by assemblage art where fragments of existing artistic objects are reconstituted into new artworks. The filmmaker here samples her own archive of media materials produced over several decades of practice, from analogue photography, Super-8mm and 16mm film recordings, early…

  • Conversations on the Lake

    Conversations on the Lake investigates politics of dwelling in rural Northwestern Ontario communities along the Lake Superior north shore. It was nominated for Best Documentary at the 2014 Female Eye Film Festival and was shown in film festivals internationally, including travelling festivals and in rural communities abroad and in Canada and the US. The film explores how the land, its waters, and its landscapes are valued by citizens who live and work in communities bordering the Canadian side of Lake Superior, the largest freshwater supply on the continent, expressing a sense of place unique to the region. With the landscape…

  • Homunculi

    Filmed sporadically and intuitively during the summer months of 2020 and 2021, Homunculi is a recontextualization of a personal archive of hand processed 16mm “home movies” and various cinematographic experiments. Reassembled, these once disparate images form a cinematic prism in which to view and confront the prevalent anxieties of an increasing uncertain future. Homunculi is a visual and sonic daydream, reaching beneath the facade of domestic and pastoral tranquility to reveal a lurking, inevitable force that promises to tear the world asunder.

  • Arrival 1, Arrival 2

    This experimental essay film springs from the final days of December 2020 when I moved from Chicago to Toronto. The film documents my move and then continues on alternate paths, weaving through the liminal spaces of borders, sickness, interpellation, and dreams. Content Note: This film contains extended discussions about fatphobia and disordered eating. Specifically, this film contains descriptions of food restriction, idealization of thinness, and intense emotional and physical pain after eating. After 11:41 there is no direct discussion of disordered eating. Flashing lights throughout. Loud noises throughout.

  • Pressure & Release

    Pressure & Release is a multi-layered story drawn from memories of my paradoxical sleep, a sub-conscious response to the recognition that we are amid the “Anthropocene period” and the “Holocene extinction.” Certain ideologies combined with well ingrained cultural practices are driving this rapid transformation into something we may or may not yet imagine as this era’s lasting presence unfolds.