Film Categories: War + Conflict

  • Sab Shimono: Acting “As If”

    On the eve of his eightieth birthday, acclaimed Japanese American actor Sab Shimono reflects on his lifelong commitment to the craft of acting, his struggles against racism and homophobia, and how his life was transformed by gay bars and marriage equality.

  • Determinations

    1988 & 2023 4K revision (Revision sponsored by Telefilm Canada Reignite program (for historical valuable Canadian films and to archive such films) which allowed me to transfer my 1988 16mm film to 4k video. A post-punk gonzo doco from the 1980’s restored for the digital realm. The Squamish Five story — a significant historical Canadian recollection, a refreshment of memory in a time of ever increasing environmental suicidal somnambulism & social, political dementia. The Reagan era (1981 – 1989) in the USA marked a time of heightened tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union, with the deployment of…

  • The Shadow of My Life

    Hanna, a recent immigrant to Canada from Iran, struggles with depression as she tries to process memories of Iran and find her place in a new country. As she rediscovers her passion for painting she finds inspiration from other artists. Told in graphic monochrome animation with occasional striking splashes of red. Image description: A graphic drawing in stark black-and-white depicts a woman and her shadow considering themselves in a mirror.

  • What Comes Between

    What Comes Between is an examination of personal memory and loss rooted in the filmmaker’s birth place – Chile – and her departure from that country long ago. The work is a collage film created with found footage from personal and historic sources, and original hand printed and tinted footage.

  • Ever Wanting (for Margaret Chung)

    Inspired by San Francisco’s first Chinese American female physician, this film envisions the euphoria and despair of Margaret Chung and her insatiable desire for women and celebrity through her forays into drugs, sapphic surgeries, and queer flights of fancy. Image description: A black-and-white archival image toned warm purple, showing a woman dancing with arms raised to the side and skirt flared out in a circle.

  • A Life on the Borderlands

    This is a film about my father, who immigrated to Montreal from Chile in the early 1970s after a hard-scrabble life on the streets of Santiago as a youth. Like my mother, who immigrated from Argentina around that time, his mobile life was characterised by neither chain migration nor lasting social ties with members of his ethnic group. His story is also a story about class, politics, and complicated histories of migration and exile.

  • sway

    A sequel to the pandemic-themed reflection “still”, “sway” explores the seductive – and destructive – pull of fear.

  • VIA KARELIA

    Tracing back a lost identity, hidden in the forests of an abandoned war zone. How does a trauma get carried on from a generation to another and is there a way to stop the cycle? The filmmaker tries to understand how to heal from the pressures of the past by searching for their grandmother’s childhood home. Taking the journey with their parents, they find themselves in a village located in the old Karelia, now a part of Russia.

  • Unarchive

    Unarchive juxtaposes the filmmaker’s father’s life with the political history of Chile – his birthplace – over the past century. It reflects on how we remember and how we forget, and the role of the camera in transcending the complex space in between.

  • The Last Happy Day

    A portrait of a doctor who saw the worst of society and ran The Last Happy Day is an experimental documentary portrait of Sandor (Alexander) Lenard, a Hungarian medical doctor and a distant cousin of filmmaker Lynne Sachs. In 1938 Lenard, a writer with a Jewish background, fled the Nazis to a safe haven in Rome. Shortly thereafter, the U.S. Army Graves Registration Service hired Lenard to reconstruct the bones — small and large — of dead American soldiers. Eventually he found himself in remotest Brazil where he embarked on the translation of “Winnie the Pooh” into Latin, an eccentric…