Film Categories: Resistance

  • Trans Lives Matter! Justice for Islan Nettles

    A powerful and intensely moving document of a community vigil for Islan Nettles, a transgender Womyn of Colour, concerning her spirit and life. Because the personal is political. Because the brutal and increasing attacks on Trans Womyn of Color are outrageous and their victimization causes outrage. Because healing and action tighten our fists and boom our voices. Islan’s murder was a hate crime, she was only 21. Her vigil was held at Jackie Robinson Park in Harlem, steps away from where she was murdered. This endeavour captured the love and support that the community brought to sustain each other and…

  • Tiny Mirrors

    An ancient goddess probes the concrete jungle that stands between her and a rising metropolis. Her primal movements shudder like haunting melodies as she seeks to discover truth.  Two teenagers descend into the city’s entrails to grow graffiti gardens and find a space to dream.  A young woman searches for wisdom with the uneasy feeling that something inside of her is shifting.  All their stories intertwine as they build bridges to the other side. Tiny Mirrors, is a music video collaboration between lal and Wandering Eye that seeks to re-imagine our perceptions of ritual, rebellion and change in a time of…

  • Looking For Carmen

    “In his most ravishing and heartbreaking work, Arriaga ventures again to his native Peru in search of a lost friend. Along the way he encounters the faces of those who speak about wounds that cannot heal—survivors recounting the deaths and disappearances of their beloveds during Peru’s civil war that pitted the communists of The Shining Path against the government, with both sides aligned against the people. “The dead have called us to find them,” remarks Lida Flores de Huaman, and Marcos follows her evocation, cutting memory trails into Peru that bring back the names of the disappeared. Using frames that…

  • Vertières I, II, III

    The Vertières battle was the last battle before Napoleon’s army withdrew from Haiti, which became the first independent nation in Latin America and the Caribbean. Botkay presents three filmic incursions into the Haitian historical, social and political process. Exploring aspects such as discipline/control, nature/tenderness and the ruin/resistance. this piece investigates the levels of domestication and enslavement resulting from the post-colonial processes that marked the history of the country. This film was selected by Nicole Brenez on the 10 best films 2015 list in Artforum.

  • Cairo In One Breath

    Every day, people are being replaced by machines. The adhan is a 1,400 year-old oral tradition in the process of unprecedented change in Cairo. After 60 generations, thousands of individual muezzins are being replaced by a single voice broadcast from a radio station as part of a plan of the Mubarak regime. As the Adhan Unification Project takes hold, Egypt undergoes Revolution and regime change. The film follows muezzins from when they heard rumors of the AUP through its implementation, which since 2010 has displaced thousands.

  • Between The Bullet and The Hole

    ‘Between the Bullet and the Hole’ is a film centred on the elusive and complex effects of war on women’s role in ballistic research and early computing. The film features new and archival high-speed bullet photography, schlieren and electric spark imagery, bullet sound wave imagery, forensic ballistic photography, slide rulers, punch cards, computer diagrams, and a soundtrack by Scanner. Like a frantic animation storyboard, it explores the flickering space between the frames, testing the perceptual mechanics of visual interpolation, the possibility of reading or deciphering the gap between before and after. Interpolation – the main task of the women studying…

  • Whitewash

    “Whitewash” examines slavery in Canada and its omission from the national narrative. The country prides itself as being the benevolent refuge where enslaved Africans who were brought to United States gained their freedom via the Underground Railroad. That powerful image overshadows the fact that slavery was legal in Canada for over 200 years under both French and British rule. “Whitewash” brings to light some of the slave families that were brought to Prince Edward Island by Loyalists and looks at how nine generations of descendants have assimilated to the point of leaving very few visible traces of their origin.

  • =

    “Making use of a dizzying array of anti-gay protest footage captured and posted on the internet, Mead’s protagonist bears witness to the fractures, shifts and resistances that have brought us to this time in LGBTQ history.” (in/future 2016)

  • Three Minute Warning

    The parallel histories of cinema and aviation re-shaped the twentieth century, generating irresistible fantasies of freedom and control. Three Minute Warning is a fast-forward history of the real impact of blue-sky thinking. You’ve had your three minute warning: now is it time to resist?

  • 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…