Film Categories: Sound Art + Music

  • Nine In One

    A study in synesthesia, matching colour and motion and gesture to sounds, correlating the auditory and the visual in relation to personal experiences with synesthesia.

  • Pilgrimage (Pelerinage)

    A simple walk in the park can become a spiritual experience, a moment of discovery, a pilgrimage. This film explores the meditative nighttime allure of the Parc Lafontaine in Montreal, Canada, turning this public space into a dark sanctuary.

  • Torrey Pines

    “Torrey Pines” is a stop-motion animated feature film by director Clyde Petersen. Based on a true story, the film is a queer punk coming-of-age tale, taking place in Southern California in the early 1990’s. Raised by a schizophrenic single mother, Petersen’s life story unfolds in a series of baffling and hallucinated events. With a mother fuelled by hallucinations of political conspiracy and family dysfunction, twelve-year-old Petersen is taken on a cross-country adventure that will forever alter the family as they know it.

  • Chicken Film

    I sat in the shade of a willow tree at the farm. A quiet place washed with iridescent cracks of light through leaves. A place supercharged by our shared past. Microstructures in the light identified with my memories of this place, the people, the events and their connection to the present. Sounds of the wind. The gentle foraging of chickens. Playful guitar practicing by my daughter Lexie sitting beside me. If this place and memory and time have an iridescence, could I find a way to preserve it? Eyes left: the garden. Eyes right: the chickens. Eyes forward: Lexie and…

  • Feeling Is Musical, The

    A documentary that presents a love for music as seen through the eyes and hearts of two young musicians: Murray LaFoy, a nineteen-year-old jazz bassist and Erika Raum, a seventeen-year-old classical violinist. The film captures each one’s unique lifestyle and shows how music touches their lives day-to-day. By melding the jazz and classical genres in a final piece composed by the duo, we discover their worlds and appreciate the love of making music that they share.

  • Burning Mountains That Spew Flame (Montañas ardientes que vomitan fuego)

    The interior of the earth became a refuge from the threat that moved closer and closer to the island. The volcanic tubes served as communication vessels between time and space. This was where they experimented their resistance.

  • Somnium Lapidum (Dream Stones)

    This stop-motion 16mm film offers an audiovisual meditation on the material animation of stones. The concept is inspired by Camillo Leonardi’s “Speculum Lapidum”, published in 1533, which describes the magical healing virtues of a variety of stones, categorized by colour. The character-based animated vignettes are inspired by the woodcuts in “De Hortus Sanitatis”, a natural history encyclopedia published in 1485, which details various methods of harnessing the power of gems. It was believed at the time that a given gem’s powers could be absorbed through focused viewing. Proposing an analogy between this belief and attraction to cinema, this film offers…

  • Lily Eng’s First Thursday

    Lily Eng was a progenitor of the first wave of Toronto performance art and experimental dance in the early 1970s. she was mostly Female Warrior rather than Tutu’d Princess—using deeply exploratory movement techniques, plus hardcore performance art concepts. Eng was cutting edge, defying ethnic and anti-feminist prejudices. Surfing on a wave of acclaim, she was one of few from the scene to establish an intercontinental reputation. The film’s title comes from Lily Eng’s First Thursday performance at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Canada, in 2016. She was there by invitation, but it was 39 years since the 1977 Documenta 6…

  • Belen

    BELÉN is a story about the consequences of experiencing a profound inspiration. The inspiration that one woman, a humble cocoa farmer and musician from a small Afro-Venezuelan village, unaware of her powers, generated in her community and in people all over the American continent, during her life, and after her death as a spiritual being. Queen of the Quitipla. Master of bamboo’s sounds and silences. Core and bridge to the African American community, to its connected beats and historical fights. A trip into the puzzled reminiscences of this woman’s life (and death), captured through more than 100 hours of amateur…

  • The Royal Women Association

    THE ROYAL WOMEN ASSOCIATION tells the story of a group of South Asian women in Calgary who have banded together to overcome the isolation and loneliness so common among older members of their community. The women break out of their shells and overcome their demons by sharing songs, poetry, food, and laughter at the group’s monthly meetings. As they plan an event that calls attention to domestic violence in the community, one member, Sarbjit, tries to come to terms with the trauma of her own past.