Film Categories: Performance

  • Christian’s Curtains

    This video was created in response to Christian Lebrat’s installation “R1R2R3R4 (Who’s Afraid Of…)”. Through rapid camera movement, the installation’s panels are converted into flickering colourful textures reminiscent of Lebrat’s film Holon (1981).

  • Seasons Fall

    Fragments of a forest trail – a path traveled many times, never the same way twice.

  • A Doll’s Eyes

    In his personal essay film, filmmaker Jonathan Wysocki searches for the meaning behind his lifelong obsession with the movie ‘Jaws.’ Wysocki recounts the terror that kept him out of the ocean during his childhood and the dark desire that drew him back as an adult. He returns to the ocean to discover a fear deeper than the shark stalking his imagination.

  • Mezzo

    When Breanna was 12 years old, she discovered opera and began exploring and acknowledging her gender identity. At age 25, she is the first transgender woman to complete a Masters in Opera at a major conservatory. The film traces the days leading up to her graduation recital while harkening back to the defining moments of her girlhood.

  • Luna e Santur

    “Originally commissioned as a short for Ben Coonley’s My First 3D Part 2 at Microscope Gallery, I expanded this project into what it currently is: hooded figures, violent passion, and stroboscopic tenderness brought on by a paranormal encounter I had in the summer of 2015.” –JGS ‘‘A visually assaultive threnody for losses never fully revealed and composed for monstrous times, LUNA E SANTUR mingles sex and death with the supernatural and subnaturalistic.’-Colin Beckett “Moon and sun are elliptically and stroboscopically conjured in Joshua Gen Solondz’s cloistered yet operatic Luna e Santur. In milky, hand-processed images, hooded figures recalling Magritte’s The Lovers enact a…

  • Chicken Film

    I sat in the shade of a willow tree at the farm. A quiet place washed with iridescent cracks of light through leaves. A place supercharged by our shared past. Microstructures in the light identified with my memories of this place, the people, the events and their connection to the present. Sounds of the wind. The gentle foraging of chickens. Playful guitar practicing by my daughter Lexie sitting beside me. If this place and memory and time have an iridescence, could I find a way to preserve it? Eyes left: the garden. Eyes right: the chickens. Eyes forward: Lexie and…

  • Helium

    Commissioned by the 8 Fest for its 10-year anniversary, “Helium” is a dual-projector work that explores the worlds of competitive bodybuilding and balloon fetish. Originating from a deep fascination of the ability to derive such intense pleasure from otherwise innocuous objects or activities, “Helium” observes inflation, lust, and explosion.

  • Lily Eng’s First Thursday

    Lily Eng was a progenitor of the first wave of Toronto performance art and experimental dance in the early 1970s. she was mostly Female Warrior rather than Tutu’d Princess—using deeply exploratory movement techniques, plus hardcore performance art concepts. Eng was cutting edge, defying ethnic and anti-feminist prejudices. Surfing on a wave of acclaim, she was one of few from the scene to establish an intercontinental reputation. The film’s title comes from Lily Eng’s First Thursday performance at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Canada, in 2016. She was there by invitation, but it was 39 years since the 1977 Documenta 6…

  • The Promise

    Set in an open field, the two men dance, jumping from reality to dream, as they follow a path, a metaphor for structure in their pursuits, giving meaning to their struggles.

  • Belen

    BELÉN is a story about the consequences of experiencing a profound inspiration. The inspiration that one woman, a humble cocoa farmer and musician from a small Afro-Venezuelan village, unaware of her powers, generated in her community and in people all over the American continent, during her life, and after her death as a spiritual being. Queen of the Quitipla. Master of bamboo’s sounds and silences. Core and bridge to the African American community, to its connected beats and historical fights. A trip into the puzzled reminiscences of this woman’s life (and death), captured through more than 100 hours of amateur…