Film Categories: Politics + Policy

  • We Are Animals

    In this alternate-history fable set in the 1980’s AIDS Crisis, a closeted young man is thrust into the midst of an anti-government coup and finds that the animal within is stronger than the monsters that oppress.

  • INTER-MEZZO

    INTER-MEZZO is a documentary of performance as well as a performance of documentary. Through a triptych, which treats the voice as a metaphor for political voice, Stephen Chen traces his journey as a male mezzo, faced with prejudice and marginalization back in Singapore, and later in North America. The schooling and suppression of his voice becomes interwoven with his experiences of colonialism and exile. DOH! OH DEAR, A FEMALE TEAR! plays with the biography documentary form, dealing with issues of voice / gender / representation as Stephen traces his westernization, the discovery and silencing of his voice, and people’s reactions…

  • Field of Stones

    “Have you ever seen anything that looked so out of place that is haunted your subconscious and you could never let it go? Well I have… Field of Stones is my personal 43:17 minute journey inspired by a strange cemetery location that took me deep into a study of religion and science. Are the two connected? Is there something more to our lives and what is next after this life? These are just some of the questions that I would eventually find answers to as well as answers to questions I was unaware I was even asking. His journey changed…

  • Republic of God

    Expressed through a collage of cropped video images that unify to create three alternating cubist video canvases, “Republic of God” is a satirical portrayal of the relationship between ruler and subject in a day of political turmoil set in a fictitious nation.

  • Satan

    Satan is sleeping with your next door neighbour. A film that examines the growing sense of something awful about to happen, and the helplessness of preventing it. Inspired by the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq. Satan was created as a collaboration between filmmaker Lisa Morse, and poet and writer Dan Walsh, through the Atlantic Filmmakers Co-op program, A Certain Openness: the filming of poetry.

  • Finding a Place to Sleep

    Based on stories my grandmother told me, I re-imagine while working as a cleaner the experiences of my ancestors during the Holodomor (forced famine) in Ukraine during the Stalinist-Soviet era. The “film” image is re-invented through digital video to enact a sense of ambiguity between authenticity and fiction, as can also be present in the act of oral storytelling. This is one chapter in “Stories for a Future Generation,” a series of shorts which together tell the stories of my family’s and my own migrations, and the inter-generational impacts of those upon our lives and on those of our family’s…

  • Underground

    Underground presents a performative and re-staged first person documentary portrait of Westminster Station/London Underground, based on footage captured during the time period leading up to and just after the July 7th 2005 transit bombings. Through re-working the original footage, this short piece sets out to explore and present the contradictory moods of the time, from the more official government position of carrying on as usual, to the sense of anxiety felt in the day to day, while highlighting the intangible effects of trauma which shaped the experience of the city and urban space at this time.

  • Trigger Warning:*rape

    Trigger Warning: *rape offers an intimate discussion between two women about their experiences as sexual assault survivors who were raped by female partners.

  • PACED

    By exploring the different meanings of pace (as speed, as measure, as constraint), PACED investigates the twin paradoxes of modern nomadism: alienation from increasing connectivity, and the constant movement of everyday life that keeps returning one back to the same place. Using non-repeating 10-second clips (shot primarily with a camera phone) which flicker across 5 split screens, PACED both collides and regulates the movement and semantic interaction of the visuals and music in accordance to an internal structure to comment on how urbanism has divorced its residents from the natural, and how its rituals and veneer distract from its cruelty…

  • NORTH SOUTH

    Reworking recently rediscovered 15-year-old footage, NORTH SOUTH is a personal and political allegory of freedom and repression in Singapore. It draws an analogy between bipolar-altered reality to life in a prosperous fascist regime (the bridge it was filmed on was a then newly-constructed link between the state university and an army officer camp). NORTH SOUTH was an experiment in the expressiveness of form and rejection of over-determined Hollywood / social realist narrative taught in Singapore. Central to its structure and intent was the foregrounding of typically background elements (montage and music) to explore their expressive potential, as well as the…