Film Categories: Urban

  • Reading Between the Lines

    Reading the replies to a personal ad she has placed, a woman imagines herself in relationships with three different men. The film uses both layering and fragmentation to weave a web of associations and create a dynamic and fast-moving flow of images and events. Quick flashbacks, like momentary thoughts, accumulate. The reading voice is the constant, a soft steady interior voice around which the images dance and leap. The most dramatic moments of a given scenario are played out in a realistic fashion, and some scenarios, differently imagined, are repeated with each of the men: the restaurant, the dance, the…

  • Snow Search

    “Snow Search” finds four performers searching for each other, each carrying one quarter of a photographic portrait of Michael Snow. A lyrical exploration through the city and an homage to Michael Snow.

  • UR Lucky

    I placed a medallion on the sidewalk and filmed whoever happened along to pick it up. The film is about not being able to have control over the event, and the acceptance of this fact. This is the first film in my Performance Trilogy, a series of films which also include “Snow Search” and “Making a Scene.” (MD)

  • Scaffolding (Andamio)

    Eduardo, a snob publicist who lives cranky most of the day and David, a shy student of literature are neighbors in a building under construction. After 6 months hardly greet a scaffold intercede between them causing unexpected reactions in each. Spanish with English subtitles

  • This Town of Toronto…

    This short film takes a rather unconventional approach to the city symphony genre, which often depicts the rhythms of the city from morning to night and relies on the symphonic composition of shots that, like in musical symphony, build through various movements until their final conclusion. This Town of Toronto… extends its temporal dimension past the span of one day to 108 years, by including some of the earliest motion picture documentations of Toronto: the Great Fire of 1904 and the traffic scene on Bay Street, including horse-drawn fire trucks and firemen rushing to extinguish the fire, all captured by…

  • Dispatches From The Future

    A grieving woman who spends too much time in her car starts to think that it might be haunted.

  • PACED

    By exploring the different meanings of pace (as speed, as measure, as constraint), PACED investigates the twin paradoxes of modern nomadism: alienation from increasing connectivity, and the constant movement of everyday life that keeps returning one back to the same place. Using non-repeating 10-second clips (shot primarily with a camera phone) which flicker across 5 split screens, PACED both collides and regulates the movement and semantic interaction of the visuals and music in accordance to an internal structure to comment on how urbanism has divorced its residents from the natural, and how its rituals and veneer distract from its cruelty…

  • you rub me the wrong way

    you rub me the wrong way was created as part of SOUND + VISION TORONTO produced by Basement Arts. This project paired 5 local filmmakers with 5 local bands/musicians and 1 local neighborhood. I was asked to interpret and adapt a song by the potent forces behind post-punk band Pants & Tie in Toronto’s dynamic Kensington Market.

  • Tale Of Winter

    Tale of Winter focuses on the societal indifference towards homeless people. One the of the biggest challenges of ours times is the lack of empathy towards the underprivileged, the poor, the deranged: the people who live on the margins of the society but who are often treated as if they are invisible, ignorable or as if they are nuisances. With Tale of Winter, I would like to draw attention to how much and how easily we disregard that which is right in front of us, that which call for our sensitivity and understanding.

  • Augury (Full Version)

    Through augury a city is founded: the bridge, the temple, the tower, the burial ground. Guided by an original soundtrack of Appalachian dirges and drones, eight connected works contemplate the history of, and possible responses to, technophilia. Using handheld and macro video, family super 8 and archival footage, Augury explores the fissures in constructed space for signs of personhood, care, and the possibility of a shared pre-linguistic ground. At each site, various strategies of ethical engagement are suggested: wait out the techno-enthrallment, unconceal the ancient myths, map alternative narratives, breathe through the machine, or seed wilderness in the cracks. Beneath…