Film Categories: Violence

  • Lions in Waiting

    The newest member of a minor league hockey team, Ray, experiences hazing by his teammates as he struggles to fit in both on and off the ice. Ray will have to find the courage to accept himself first-and maybe even inspire a fellow teammate. Award: Best of BC, Chilliwack Independent Film Festival, 2018; Emerging Student Filmmaker Award, North Bay Film Festival, 2017

  • 8401

    8401 is a moving-image and light landscape painting depicting a multi-layered, fragmented view of Villa Grimaldi in Santiago, Chile. Now a memorial park, Villa Grimaldi was a clandestine detention, torture and extermination centre during the Pinochet regime (1973-90). The image is built of hundreds of images extracted from five years of Google Street Views of the address and site, Avenida José Arrieta 8401.The sound is composed of fifteen audio loops of ambient sound and voice, deconstructed from a field recording gathered during a 2016 tour of the facility. A multitude of shifting perspectives give the impression both of deprioritizing time…

  • Without Consent

    “Without Consent” weaves a young woman’s personal account of forced adoption in Australia in the late 1960s. It recounts the legal climate that outcast young unmarried women who were pregnant during these years, the systemized abuse they endured in the name of God as well as the stories they hid.

  • Fire and Fury

    Montreal, 1734. A tragic event forever changes the life of a slave and of the entire city. A mystery where love, secrets and betrayal collide.

  • Schèmes Arbitraires

    Four choreographies in a continuous narrative working through themes of struggle and beginning within conformity and control. Five Dancers as part of a larger group of dancers, and then exploring freely in the past before being moved into the conformity space, finally they are allowed periods for competition and then play both of which inevitably reinforce, and lead them back towards, the conformity space. This project is very much a collaboration between most notably Gelymar Sanchez, a montreal choreographer, Sebastien Lavoie, an Oxford experimental musician, and Sean C Dwyer, an actor and filmmaker. Each of them have had interesting, exciting…

  • Empty Nightclub

    Drawing on footage from Pulse Nightclub in Orlando, “Empty Nightclub” is a maze of urban streets, dark corridors and dance floors. The video weaves scenes from Orlando, San Francisco, New York, Chicago and Toronto to take the viewer on a mysterious journey. Are we looking for the party or are we desperately searching for the exit?

  • Semiotics of Sab

    This experimental film essay explores the poetics of identity through an oblique portrait of gay Japanese American actor Sab Shimono. For more than five decades, Shimono has performed on stage and screen in over 150 roles as warlords, bus boys, and businessmen. Shimono asks, “How is it that we know who we are?” Recalling early structuralist works by Hollis Frampton and Martha Rosler, Semiotics of Sab displays the grammatology of queer Asian American masculinity through conflicting lexicons of race, representation, and selfhood.

  • I Want To Kill Myself

    Contemplating suicide: a biography.

  • Watching the Detectives

    Immediately after the Boston Marathon bombing in April 2013, amateur detectives took to the internet chat rooms to try and find the culprits. Users on reddit, 4chan and other gathering spots poured over photographs uploaded to the sites, looking for any detail that might point to the guilt of potential suspects. Using texts and jpegs culled from these investigations, “Watching the Detectives” narrates the process of crowd-sourcing culpability. “Chris Kennedy’s latest offering is…a half-hour meta-doc about the online sleuthing surrounding the bombing of the Boston Marathon in 2013. Imagine ‘Patriot’s Day’ without Mark Wahlberg leading the charge. Instead, a steadfast…

  • A Celebration of Darkness

    A woman with a tortured past is triggered to take an unexpected walk down memory lane, she finds herself face-to- face with her inner child. Giving her a chance to make peace with her past. Does she find a way to celebrate darkness or does she become engulfed forever by it? In 2015, Jaene turned 40. This lead her to become introspective about her unusual life history. From a childhood of severe abuse, neglect, psychiatric institutionalization and being in care, she grew to become a street involved sex worker by 20. She met Elder, Isaac Day from Serpent River First…