Film Categories: Portraits

  • this year, here

    A contemplation on queer histories, explored through memories of a family cottage.

  • Whatever Happened to Jackie Shane?

    Toronto, 1963. Jackie Shane – a black, queer, soul-singing, flamboyant Nashville-born, Toronto-based musician – had a hit song on the charts. The song was a sensation, and with the lyrics “Tell her that I’m happy, tell her that’s I’m gay; tell her I wouldn’t have it any other way”, it was also an underground gay anthem. But before being able to fully enjoy the fruits of this success, Jackie suddenly disappeared. Uncovering this forgotten piece of Toronto queer music history, artists Hortie and Reynolds recreate Jackie’s story using original shadow puppets, overhead animation and stop motion techniques. Follow Jackie through…

  • Exhumation

    Peeling back the shrouded image, “Exhumation” is a reanimation of long-lost desire. A response to news of a celebrity paternity suit and the mythology adhered to it, “Exhumation” obsesses over buried memories to create one’s own monster from memory. Re-composed of images chemically treated to disintegrate, the figures peel their identities away to remain as ghosts of what once was. At once a diary of a death mask and of speculative hope, “Exhumation” dives through years of hurt feelings to find that although the body was here, you vanished.

  • Building History: The Story of Benjamin Brown

    A portrait of Toronto’s first practicing Jewish architect. Working at a time of anti-Semitism in the city, Benjamin Brown’s buildings stand as a testament to Toronto’s cultural and industrial history.

  • Inventory

    Often the very things that appear to enable a sense of security, stability, and status can be disrupted, or rendered obsolete, destined to become a memory, or simply just forgotten. On the other hand, things that frame our passions while informing our dreams have the very real potential of retaining their meaning, regardless of any actual or imagined externalities. Before leaving home last July to begin an artist residency I went to pick up a couple of things at a nearby big box store only to discover that it had been closed. A crew was removing all the signs on…

  • Velocity

    I generally gravitate towards places that reveal the many layers of time when deciding on a particular location to set up my camera and tripod. This is when I like to imagine worlds that have passed, worlds that are present, and worlds that are yet to be. In 2009 Johan Rockström led the team which developed the “Planetary Boundaries Framework,” a set of 9 boundaries that they define as a “safe operating space for humanity.” These scientists assert that once certain thresholds or tipping points are passed there is a risk of “irreversible and abrupt environmental change.” In 1976 a…

  • Utopia

    The purpose of this or that, or its role in enabling a sense of security or status is ephemeral, depending on factors that may or may not be readily apparent. As systems shift from one emphasis to an other, or as one system supplants an other, the meaning of something can be altered to such a degree that a new description may be required to understand its context. Various intersections in downtown Vancouver including the Trump Tower looming over the other buildings – Fishing Boat approaches Ucluelet after some time out at sea – Afternoon clouds, Crowsnest Mountain – Lonely…

  • Nachlass

    “Nachlass” is the German word for inheritance. It is also the word for posthumously published works. Most commonly, it is used to describe all the things, both the valuables and the junk, left behind in an apartment after its inhabitant has died. In Nachlass the everyday objects of a Ukrainian immigrant to Canada function as placeholders for all of the information that has gone missing between languages and cultures in the process of immigration. However, although this story at the turn of the century is one, which must operate beyond the realm of language, its continuation today in the Germany…

  • UUFO

    “UUFO” consists of six short chapters/stories. Each chapter describes a memory. The film deals with conflicting interpretations of China from the 1960s onwards, contrasting past generations’ stories with my own generation’s interpretations. UUFO stands for Universal Unidentified Flying Object.

  • Saint Bathans Repetitions

    A series of cinematic portraits of Jacques Larose shot in domestic spaces in the former gold-mining town of Saint Bathans, New Zealand expand into a tapestry of glistening natural light and vaporous movement, created via a painstaking process of in-camera layering effects. “Shot in a saloon and horse stables in the former gold mining town of St. Bathans, New Zealand, the film drifts between representation and graphic abstraction as these cinematic portraits, which are layered in-camera, multiply the solitary figure through temporal diffraction.” – IMAGES Festival Selected Screenings: International Film Festival Rotterdam (2018), Images Festival (Toronto, ON, 2018), Crossroads Festival…