Film Categories: Violence

  • The Ritual of the Sex Magick Warriors

    The Sex Magick Warriors are organizing, they reveal themselves to the city and risk it all to carry out an obscure objective. The colors pink and teal are the embodiment of Magick, Art and Sexuality and their use by the warriors -through empathy, telepathy and tactile care- spills the tea on their means for survival in these harsh urban environments. The ritual exposes the hardships of this army of lovers and reveals their sensual strategy for self preservation.

  • The Island

    A garden between Oakland and Berkley where its inhabitants, marginalized by gentrification, plant fruit trees and flowers to pay homage to their loved ones who died in battles against poverty. This is a space of love and freedom cared by Brian for the last 25 years. The island resists, as a living legacy of the Black Panthers who were the first to organize the neighbourhood.

  • 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

  • Monument

    Beginning in ghostly abstraction and accumulating texture by texture into a droning meditative trance, Monument deepens to a visual and sonic intensity, mixing Super 8 film with video footage to create a complicated, multilayered encounter with the tension of protest and reclamation. A vivid and energetic durational experience of collective resistance and celebration. Super 8 footage of the decaying monuments of Presidents Park (Croaker, VA) are layered with video footage captured on Monument Avenue (Richmond, VA) during the Covid-19 pandemic and Black Lives Matter protests of 2020. Themes of registration and re- calibration are explored through form and content and…

  • The Sky After Rain (Shyla Hope)

    Based on recorded audio interviews with Shyla Hope discussing her inner self journey to understanding and accepting her identity as a lesbian trans woman growing up in Iran.

  • A Semiotic Square for Violent Bear

    What does our culture dream? How can we locate that dream within the logics which govern our lives? Half collage, half essay, half serious, “A Semiotic Square for Violent Bear” is a busy, referential riff on the political moment.

  • and the story remains

    After years of silence, a woman returns to a memory she was once forbidden to recall. As she develops forgotten images, the past surfaces in fragments of light, grain, and the slow emergence of a face. The film lingers between past and present, exploring whether enforced silence can wound more deeply than the trauma itself.

  • It’s Not Brakhage

    It’s Not Brakhage is a feature-length parafiction film, structured around an unnamed narrator’s investigation of a mysterious film reel, believed to be a lost work by experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage. Shrouded in speculation and actively contested, the film reel is believed to be the sole remaining artifact from a cancelled 1959 film festival, co-organized by Brakhage and military-industrial giant DuPont chemical. The story follows the narrator’s forensic deconstruction of the film reel’s history, sifting through a patchwork of theories and speculations that have arisen since its discovery, and connecting the artifact to DuPont’s wider networks of military-industrial research and artistic…

  • PATH

    Employing a simple three-part structure, “PATH” is about personal experience and the interpretation of that experience. Both humorous and serious, the film is a cross-Toronto exploration, expansively taking in a wide variety of people, events and situations. In creating a dynamic web of associations, “PATH” invites participation in the act of perception. The film’s structure works like this: Davis is filmed connecting dots on a street map; next she walks that distance on the street, filming as she goes; then she recalls and interprets what she has seen in memory sequences. The street sequences have a variety of different rhythms…

  • The Flower and The Flood

    Following the seasonal cycle of a saffron farm based in the Fraser Valley, the film explores unmechanized labor through harvesting the delicate crocus stamen by hand. After an atmospheric river decimates the flourishing saffron crop in 2021, the flood waters temporarily return Semá:th Xó:tsa to the valley more than a century after its forced draining. The film traces the interconnected history of this sacred lake with the rebuilding of the saffron crop; cultivating community and the most expensive spice in the world. Collaborating with the saffron crocus and other plants through eco-processing and analogue processes, the family garden offers us…