Film Categories: Poetry

  • Concrete Shape

    To face your fear, you must let it enter your life as a Concrete Shape. An onsite video performance by Jesi Jordan created at the Diego Rivera Anahuacalli Museum in Mexico City. This film is made using hand made special effects and biodegradable materials such as Oaxacan clay, lava rocks, chicken eggs, cactus husks, and water.

  • Picking Up

    At a diner one summer night, David and Syd unite after years without seeing each other. Memories long dormant are rekindled. Based on diary entries by the artist David Wojnarowicz.

  • One Day

    “One Day” is an experimental film that delves into the depth of a single photograph. Captured by the artist during her initial exploration of film photography in Toronto, this snapshot becomes the centerpiece of an experimental piece. The passage of six years before its development mirrors the artist’s personal journey- a journey that leads her to choose Toronto as her permanent abode after traversing Iran, Montreal, and Europe. Relocating with her family in 2009, the city’s embrace as a second home poses a poignant challenge. The haunting presence of immigrant status looms large, leaving an indelible mark on the artist’s…

  • FOTO CINE MAMA & I

    There are eyes everywhere. No blind spot left. What shall we dream of when everything becomes visible? We’ll dream of being blind.” — Paul Virilio If you have no room for a film essay work – don’t waste your time further. A film essay delving into the essence of photography, intrinsically incomplete, lacking, fractional. All images inherently reach beyond their boundaries—this is a truth rooted in history and made even more evident in our current age, dominated by the astonishing and decisive powers of artificial intelligence. The film’s core utilizes a collection of personal photographs of the filmmaker’s mother and…

  • A More Radiant Sphere

    A More Radiant Sphere tells the long-lost story of Communist poet, activist and Canadian political prisoner Joe Wallace, bringing him to life through archival material, both real and imagined. This hybrid film is shot primarily on 16mm film and weaves together the story of Wallace, the failed Canadian Communist Party, and the filmmaker’s own surprising discovery of her relation to Wallace through a distant relationship with her father (Joe’s great-nephew). Segmented throughout are folk songs based on Wallace’s writings, performed by award-winning folk musician Simone Schmidt, aka Fiver. The film delves into the limits of history and its records, and…

  • Tërra Bëstia

    Amidst a biodiverse wasteland on the brink of being enveloped by encroaching bitumen, the enigmatic Beast of the Earth materializes in a prophetic dance. Its vivid gestures, suspended between the celestial and terrestrial realms, serve as a conduit for conveying the portents of humanity’s impending fate.

  • Currents / Perpendicolare Avanti

    Currents / Perpendicolare Avanti is a camera-less, hand-made, 16mm film collage, based on the artist’s autobiographical experience as an immigrant. In three movements, the film explores the dynamics of inhabiting the in-between space of moving between multiple countries and their temporalities, through visual and sound abstraction, interlacing and recycling pre-existing film materials and, using fragments from anonymous orphan films. Utilizing these so-called scraps, Currents is a film of extensive remediation, treated by hand through the use of the emulsion lifting technique, thereby re-imagining, re-constructing, and de-constructing the liminality of immigrant life. The re-writing of the self in Currents is produced…

  • Negative / Positive Film

    Negative / Positive Film is a hand-made, camera-less collage film composed of layers of erotic 16mm films from the 1920s, 1940s, and 1970s, intermingled with nature documentaries and layers of organic materials. This visual abstraction merges together both positive black-and-white film and its negative black-and-white counterpart – on the same film base. This allows the film to exist in two versions, one positive and, the other negative. The film is an abstract remediation of female bodies dislodged from their original erotic context and ripped away from their male co-protagonists. The man is removed from the picture, while the female body…

  • Self-Portrait in Hell

    Self-Portrait in Hell is a hybrid film that combines analog and digital film manipulation techniques. Multiple layers of 8mm films and disparate fragments are amalgamated to create a self-portrait of the director. A singular self-portrait, since ironically the subject of the film is not the director but the image found in abandoned film archives, the image of another, unknown woman. The first layer is from a 1970s 8mm home movie titled Woman Dancing with Dog and was found in an antique shop. The second layer is an 8mm film belonging to an unknown archive, which the artist buried for a…

  • Hoa

    Before developing her memory disorders, my grandmother Trần Thị Tuyết Hoa wrote an autobiographical book about her life and its events. The book is titled “Hồi Ức Tuyết Hoa” (Memories of Tuyết Hoa), and subtitled “Khi Đất Nước Tôi Thanh Bình: Hồi ức của một nữ sinh viên Sài Gòn” (When My Country is Peaceful: Memoirs of a Saigon Female Student). She now reads this book everyday in her Hanoi home. In the form of a poetic letter, this short film is dedicated to her, from me, a grandchild.