Film Categories: Resistance

  • And Then We Marched

    Filmmaker Lynne Sachs shoots Super 8mm film of the Jan. 21 Women’s March in Washington, D.C. and intercuts this recent footage with archival material of early 20th Century Suffragists marching for the right to vote, 1960s antiwar activists and 1970s advocates for the Equal Rights Amendment. Sachs then talks about the experience of marching with her seven-year old neighbor who offers disarmingly insightful observations on the meaning of their shared actions. Screenings: Other Cinema, San Francisco; Workers Unite Film Festival, 2019 KOSMA Gwangju International organized by the Korean Society of Media & Arts

  • Unarchive

    Unarchive juxtaposes the filmmaker’s father’s life with the political history of Chile – his birthplace – over the past century. It reflects on how we remember and how we forget, and the role of the camera in transcending the complex space in between.

  • Gay As In Happy: A Queer Anti-Tragedy

    An award-winning experimental autoethnographic documentary about queer joy, resistance, and resilience in the face of abuse, trauma, and transphobia.

  • Green and Red, But Terracotta Red

    We are looking through the mirror of time, into distorted memories, while several narrators tell us about the most vivid colours in their dreams. The film consists of a collage of 16mm found footage that I further processed and decayed using a gentle combination of bleaching techniques. This process allowed me to partially lift the emulsion from the film base and re-shift it and re-position it by hand. Faces are warped, homes collapse, memories fade and blur.

  • 04/19/1968

    Layers of history merge with layers of media in this hybrid experimental film. An autobiographical ode to the filmmaker’s family and what’s left of their memories. A remediation collage of 16mm film, old 35mm Kodak slides and a digital computer screen. Filmed with an old DSLR camera at a specific angle in order to capture the ethereal reflections.

  • Salt River Water Walk

    In February 2020, Sharon Day (Ojibwe) led a group of Water Walkers through the Arizona desert to walk for the Salt River. Through animation and live footage, this documentary travels with the Salt River Water Walkers, describing this Indigenous-led ceremony as it creates community and builds relationships with the earth through the shared goal to care for the water. The project was organized by the Museum of Walking. The film was made possible through the Museum of Walking, the Institute for Desert Humanities at Arizona State University, and Indigenous People’s Task Force.

  • Exercises for Being Close to You: A Story for the Arctic Refuge

    Exercises for Being Close to You is an experimental documentary that follows a group of hikers through Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The team is in search of the Porcupine Caribou herd in hopes of collecting stories that could help push back on oil exploration and drilling on the caribou’s birthing grounds. The narrator, admitting to a perverse desire to be close to everything, wants nothing more than to spoon a caribou. As the film culminates in anticipation of the “money shot”, the audience is pushed to evaluate its expectations of nature films. Meanwhile, the expedition team is left to…

  • sway / pull

    Created during the COVID-19 pandemic when queer spaces were disappearing across Toronto, sway / pull is a meditation on the erosion of Hanlan’s point beach in both literal and figurative senses. Hanlan’s Point Beach, located on the Toronto Islands, was the site of Toronto first gay pride celebrations in 1970s and remains a queer haven today. Additionally, the Toronto Islands have faced poor city planning that has led to a significant amount of erosion on the beach. This film plays with the concept of erosion by the physical pushing of sand to speak back to the literal erosion of the…

  • fuck

    A short solo film made in quarantine, “fuck” is part silent meditation, part protest, part magic spell for a better world.

  • HK Uprising

    A tribute to the ongoing protests in Hong Kong that are taking place three decades after the Tiananmen Square uprising. Note: This film can be displayed as a multi-channel installation with May 35.