Film Categories: Portraits

  • Ayesha

    An imaginary biography of my mother who, in her youth, dreamed of being a Bollywood dancer. In a lush fantasy through the heart of India, I reclaim her destiny and desires lost in another age.

  • Kaleidoscope

    Kaleidoscope explores depression in an otherwise vibrant life. It is an original film poem edited to 16mm hand-processed B&W film that has been manipulated through tinting, toning and other cameraless techniques to reflect the fluctuations of living with a mood disorder. Footage collected during the Film for Artists and Film Farm residencies in 2016.

  • Crossing Bridges

    A gay Asian man reflects on his experience coming to Canada from Indonesia and learning to embrace his sexuality identity, and culture. In this reflective documentary, Rama provides a window into his journey as he revisits places communities and LGBTQ organizations that have helped him to build bridges to overcome the challenges that he faced as an ethnic gay man and immigrant to Canada.

  • A Small Part Of Me

    A transgender teen prepares to make his acting debut playing a male leading character in a youth play. While rehearsals are in progress, his friends and chosen family band together to help remove him from a difficult living situation. A short documentary about coming out and coming-of-age in a small mountain town in British Columbia.

  • Without Consent

    “Without Consent” weaves a young woman’s personal account of forced adoption in Australia in the late 1960s. It recounts the legal climate that outcast young unmarried women who were pregnant during these years, the systemized abuse they endured in the name of God as well as the stories they hid.

  • Noema

    Audio-visual notes on the encounter with 93-year-old painter Tatjana, who is losing her eyesight. Gestures gently observed through the tips of her hair interfere with thoughts about the sense of time and a dreamlike reality. Moving images follow the painter’s alignment relying more than ever on her experienced hand and imagination and exploring sensory perception beyond seeing.

  • Angela

    This short documentary explores a week in the life of Angela—a roller derby athlete and transgender rights activist in Alberta, Canada. As a jammer for the Calgary All-Stars team, she skates under the name Easy Break Oven and is a role model in the local derby community. She also coaches kids from the small-towns surrounding the city, which is one of the most conservative and religious parts of the country. While preparing for her first derby match of the season, she begins to see her teammates and her life in a new light.

  • David In Brief

    The story of David and Goliath is one of the oldest narratives of all time. The legend continues to resonate with individuals and cultures from around the world and offers a perspective that everyone has the power to overcome impossible situations, even when the odds of failure are high. For years, I hid from my own Goliath: personal struggles with sexual identity and, questioning who I was as an individual. Like so many others, I had to risk relationships and acceptance to be the man I wanted to be. I wanted to hear how others, with larger-than-life obstacles, faced their…

  • RUPTURE

    By and large humans tend to create narratives about themselves, then often make great effort to conform reality to that narrative. This was not a threat to planetary survival 10,000 years ago when we were scattered in small bands worshipping local deities and relying on nearby gathered foodstuffs with only stone tools. It is quite an other thing when we are packed into mega-cities with nuclear weapons and ambiguous connectivities, along with relationships imbued in instruments that far exceed an individual’s capacity to fully comprehend or to realibly navigate our various systems. Sequence in order of appearance: Secret Bunker –…

  • Potamkin

    In 1933, at age 33, Harry Alan Potamkin died of complications related to starvation, at a time when he was one of the world’s most respected film critics. In his writings, he advocated for a cinema that would simultaneously embrace the fractures and polyphony of modern life and the equitable social vision of left radical politics. This film-biography is assembled out of distorted fragments of films on which he had written, an impression of erupting consciousness. At the Odessa steps, trampling gives breath to the child. The bullet miraculously reforms the face. The Cossacks march backwards, retreating unseen into their…