Film Categories: Travel

  • Matin Dans Une Foret de Pins (Morning in the Pine Forest)

    The lives of six young people unfold in a journey through different worlds revealed and interwoven, where the boundaries between documentary and fiction, reality and dream cease to exist. The volatile and seductive landscape of urban and rural Latvia was treated as a rich context for the complex relationships one has with the world – inviting the viewer to come upon the questions that bind us in our common need to understand our humanness. This film is based on the lives of HELENA, EVA, JANKA, GUNTIS, ANNA and GALC.

  • Pappy’s Garden

    A personal tribute to the filmmaker’s grandfather, a first-generation immigrant to Toronto, Canada from Jamaica in the 1950s. Through both digital and super 8mm found family footage, Mike’s past catches up with him as he struggles with difficult memories from his childhood in Jamaica, finding comfort in his spectacularly over-grown garden.

  • The Places We Lived

    The Places We Lived uses a large family archive of Super8 and digital home movies from the mid-1970s to late 1990s to grapple with the hopes, dreams, and disappointments of two South American immigrants who moved to Montreal in the wake of the excitement and optimism generated by Expo ’67. This story focuses on the father, Jose (“Pepe”), whose life in Canada followed four hardscrabble decades in Chile. A story about childhood and fatherhood, aging, capitalism, and obsolescence, The Places We Lived opens up new questions about class, memory, diasporic narratives, and the complicated histories of migration and exile.

  • Toad, Leaf, Grass, Rock

    A 16mm hybrid visual poem, at the crossroad between intertextuality and documentary. This film “plays” with images in an enigmatic way. Weaving, in the words of Eugenio Montale, a disappearing and deserted suburban landscape into the fabric of images, sounds, and textures of two far away lovers yearning for each other.

  • Qualcosa di Rosso, Qualcosa di Blu

    Qualcosa di Rosso, Qualcosa di Blu combines layers of 16mm and 35mm found footage films to create a lyrical journey that accompanies the viewer into the depths of a dream of another life.

  • The Initiation Well

    The Quinta da Regaleira in Sintra, Portugal is a huge estate that has two wells for performing initiation ceremonies built into the ground. This film takes us into one of them. Sound design by Samuel La France.

  • I Dream of Vancouver

    In a reality continually refracted through the lens of corporate technology, what remains of those who don’t fit into this vision of the world? I Dream of Vancouver is an experimental short that explores this question through the digital landscape of Vancouver, BC. Using hypnagogic visuals and a haunting soundscape, this work expresses the detachment from the lived experience of spaces as these spaces are subsumed by algorithms and mediated images. While focusing on Vancouver as a case study, this documentary explores issues that are relevant to the world at large, such as the link between corporate technologies and gentrification…

  • Sound of a Shadow

    A wabi sabi summer in Japan – observing that which is imperfect, impermanent and incomplete– produces a series of visual haiku in search of teeming street life, bodies in motion, and leaf prints in the mud. Festivals: Athens Film Festival, Black Maria Film Festival Award Winner

  • GIRLBAND

    Life on the road. It’s not easy. 50 hours of cub tour footage (1994 & 1996) boiled down to this. Thanks to Canada Council for the Arts, Vtape, Trinity Square Video and FAG for support.

  • My Canada Train Journey

    50-plus years after a memorable overnight Canadian train ride, Sandy McLennan boards regional and remote lines, with main line and public transit between them. This time shooting Double 8mm film, the same format he fell in love with while screening family home movies just for himself. What was he thinking?