Film Categories: Sound Art + Music

The Fenestration of Suburbia

The Fenestration of Suburbia is a melancholic social documentation of a cold Canadian suburb. Framed behind windows and surveilled from the street, the lives of suburbanites float in the black cinematic frame to form images that are simultaneously sorrowful, mundane, theatrical, and puzzling.
Breakdown

I stay home one Saturday night to clean my back patio which I have been avoiding for months due to an ongoing mental health crisis. The only way I am able to clean is to make a performance of it.
Fly My Spirits

Elaine Pain has been drawing stylized birds for many years. To her, they are a universal “bird of hope.” Bright and colourful birds, with a life of their own, move to percussion music by Gordon Parsons, giving them a primitive power.
For a Woman in El Salvador, Speaking

Claudina Calderon, pregnant, with a small son, disappeared in San Salvador, abducted by government security forces. Her plight generates this filmic meditation, creating the voice of her mother through poetry, music, and murals to dramatize the story of one woman who stands for many. This film was made for the Women’s Association of El Salvador (AMES). With Susan Freundlich, sign artist, and the voices of Carolyn Forche and Yanira Chacon.
Queer Camp Trilogy

The Queer Camp Trilogy is a series of experimental films exploring the hidden dimensions of queer Japanese American wartime history. This trilogy, made up of Looking For Jiro (2011), Warning Shot (2016), and On the Line (2018), was inspired by first-generation Japanese Americans who were incarcerated by the US government during World War II. These subjects left subtle yet discernible traces of same-sex intimacy or gender nonconformity in the archive, despite the enormous pressure put upon Japanese Americans to accept their imprisonment quietly, prove their patriotic loyalty, and smile for Ansel Adams during their unlawful imprisonment. I approached their enigmatic…
A Day With My Family

Some video segments of a day with my family at the farm. At editing, I had fun doing something more meaningful. The message of this film is: family, love, friendship are important things in life.
May 35

A haunting commemoration of the Tiananmen Square uprisings made from fragments of censored archival imagery transferred onto film using razor blades and scotch tape. “May 35” speaks to the difficulty of remembering in the absence of memory, especially when June 4 histories have been censored and obscured. It is a tribute to the thousands of lives devastated by this upheaval. Sound Design: Kadet Kuhne
Badassery

This compelling exposé takes a look at three female DJs who are unapologetically disrupting the Toronto hip-hop scene. The film chronicles the journey of women who are pursuing their passions and crafting their careers in a male-dominated industry. From the up-and-coming independent curator to the global powerhouse, these creatives have crafted a brand for themselves as industry leaders, without compromising who they are. They are paving the way for a generation of women and LGBTQ people, previously excluded from the social and cultural norms of the hip-hop world. It is the weirdos and nonconformists who are now redefining what it…
Letters From Vancouver

Letters from Vancouver (1973) comprise two films, made at the same time, that share a common interest in “the medium is the message” (McLuhan), and form a reflexive, self-referential enquiry into the film medium itself. Together, “the politics of perception” (33min)and “the framing of perception” (33min) form a meditation on our audio/visual creation, bearer of information and culture, meaning and representation. It is a medium with extraordinary powers, able to evoke the deepest feelings of love and loss, anger and fear, laughter and thoughtfulness, yet of great fragility, fading with time, precarious on a perforated strip of celluloid.
Hear Me

A formal collage of various song bites that expresses feelings of anxiety and depression. Uses music and lyrics to describe struggles with mental health / finding hope. I collected lyrics for a couple months that I connected with and helped me understand and describe my struggles with mental health. Then I stitched them together in a poem of sorts. The poem as well as the imagery are jumpy and mimic what goes on in a spiral or panic attack (at least for me) as I move through a dark space and back toward light.