Film Categories: Politics + Policy

  • Gulf

    This film was shot on the north shore of Cuba looking towards the Gulf of Mexico, just months before 4.9 million barrels of oil was spilled by Deepwater Horizon between April 20-July 15, 2010. Wave patterns fill the frame, tearing apart the filmstrip itself. Selected Screenings: Berwick FIlm & Media Arts Festival, 2017 (Berwick-on-Tweed, UK)

  • Equal Justice Under Law

    Shot on June 26, 2015, following the U.S. Supreme Court’s historic ruling on marriage equality, this documentary combines President Barack Obama’s speech about the ruling with video of the reaction in San Francisco. This short films draws the line between the struggles for civil rights and LGBTQ rights.

  • PYOTR495

    “PYOTR495” is set one evening in present day Moscow. 16-year-old Pyotr is baited by an ultra-nationalist group known for their violent abductions and anti-gay attacks, bolstered by Russia’s LGBT propaganda law. But Pyotr has a dangerous secret his attackers could never have accounted for.

  • Arrested (Again)

    Activist Karen Topakian has been arrested dozens of times for using nonviolent civil disobedience to protest nuclear proliferation, human rights abuses, environmental issues, and war. Most recently, Karen was arrested along with six other Greenpeace activists after unfurling a 70-foot “RESIST” banner from a crane near the White House. What drives her to repeatedly put her body on the line?   In turn lighthearted and moving, Karen’s story speaks to the need for Americans, now more than ever, to exercise this important First Amendment right. Following her first arrest in 1982, Karen began working at Greenpeace as a nuclear disarmament…

  • Watching the Detectives

    Immediately after the Boston Marathon bombing in April 2013, amateur detectives took to the internet chat rooms to try and find the culprits. Users on reddit, 4chan and other gathering spots poured over photographs uploaded to the sites, looking for any detail that might point to the guilt of potential suspects. Using texts and jpegs culled from these investigations, “Watching the Detectives” narrates the process of crowd-sourcing culpability. “Chris Kennedy’s latest offering is…a half-hour meta-doc about the online sleuthing surrounding the bombing of the Boston Marathon in 2013. Imagine ‘Patriot’s Day’ without Mark Wahlberg leading the charge. Instead, a steadfast…

  • DataMine

    “DataMine” is a stop-motion indictment of surveillance society; laboriously animated by hand with light painting to create surreal imagery without the use of computer generated images. Society embraces an ever-increasing connection to technology, creating digital communities that distract us from our real world existence. As our lives exist more and more in the digital realm, they are catalogued and stored for future mining by corporations and governments. This activity of data mining raises many questions regarding the future of activism and creativity – that which makes us human. In the intricate world of “DataMine,” the oblivious masses are catalogued and…

  • ôtênaw

    “ôtênaw” is a film documenting the oral storytelling of Dwayne Donald, an educator from Treaty 6, Edmonton Canada. Drawing from nêhiyawak philosophies, he speaks about the multilayered histories of Indigenous peoples’ presence both within and around amiskwacîwâskahikan, or what has come to be known as the city of Edmonton.

  • Mino-bimaadiziwin (The Good Life)

    Mino-bimaadiziwin (The Good Life) came out of the Artist for Film residency at Artscape Gibraltar Point. I was excited about First Story’s walking tour with Elder Carolyn King. I was only able to participate with the aid of a wheelchair and allow others to push me around, it was my first time in a wheelchair. I documented this walk from that perspective with this manual timelapse on Super 8. Reconciling myself as a mixed-race indigenous Colombian settler “walking the red road” while being a person who lives with physical disabilities. Learning to live mino-bimaadiziwin as a settler to Turtle Island…

  • You’ve Got Tail

    A mail carrier is in for a salty surprise! The pups at this house are a little friendlier than he was expecting…

  • Lunch Time

    In this film we drive through downtown Cairo. While exploring the urban life and daily routine of the streets near Tahrir square, we sink into a labyrinth where our path keeps on being cut. During the 2011 revolution it was often said that “the people took back the streets”, but since then the police and military have returned to power and show their supremacy by controlling the public spaces, leaving many to adapt to a system where they have no voice and must work around the obstacles that are left behind.