Film Format: 16mm

  • Traje de Luces | Suit of Lights

    Traje de Luces | Suit of Lights is an expressive documentary composed with footage of a Spanish bullfight, that iconic imagery of highly decorated masculinity and violence masked as nationalism. The footage was drawn from Jacques Madvo Collection material filmed in Spain between 1976-1978. Madvo shot this footage at a time when Spain began its difficult and flawed transition to democracy in the years following dictator Francisco Franco’s death in 1975. The film consists of 16mm footage that has been decayed in soil, contact-printed and laboriously re-photographed and these abstractions of light and darkness ground the inquiry surrounding why citizens…

  • Soy un ser cuyas raíces // I am a being whose roots

    Soy un ser cuyas raíces // I am a being whose roots reworks Jacques Madvo’s Countries & People: Venezuela to explore labour and migration. Taking the final words of the film’s voice-over as a starting point, Soy un ser cuyas raíces // I am a being whose roots pairs Madvo’s film footage with a text-based conversation with young Venezuelan literature scholar and language teacher Angel Said Dominguez Pinto. Dominguez Pinto relocated to Panama in 2014 to make a living teaching English, Spanish & German in Panama City after Venezuela’s economic collapse. Over e-mail, we co-authored a conversational text, exploring migration,…

  • Fireloop

    One of three films made in conjunction with the Boulder “Sunday Associates” production of Jane Brakhage’s story of Caesar’s invasion of Britain, Caswallon the Headhunter … “Fireloop” is a hand-painted loop used as part of the special effects in the final Caswallon production, a closed-eye envisionment of “a fire in the mind,” with accompanying soundtrack by Joel Haertling.

  • New Woman 新女性

    New Woman is a meditative journey that investigates the look of the “New Woman” in Chinese silent screen. Through using archival film footage with intertitles also derived from the Chinese silent films, the film explores patriarchal perspectives in the portrayal of women in Chinese silent cinema, and deconstructs their appearances in order to reveal the impressive talent and outlook of the “New Woman”, which have been largely ignored and forgotten. The film features four thematic sections, Virtue, Modeng Woman, Unbound Feet, and New Woman. The footage of each section has been re-worked differently by using relevant hand processing and manipulation…

  • Fires of Transformation

    “Fires of Transformation” is a documentary about a unique women’s theatre troupe called VOICE (Violence Overcome in Creative Ensemble), who have collectively written and performed an original play based on their own experiences as survivors of wife assault and other forms of violence against women and children. The film chronicles VOICE’s 1990 National Tour, taking its viewers on an emotional and triumphant journey across Canada. Utilizing interviews, audience discussions, and scenes from VOICE’s powerful play the film celebrates the courage and strength of the women who created it and documents a process of empowerment and transformation.

  • Exhumation

    Peeling back the shrouded image, “Exhumation” is a reanimation of long-lost desire. A response to news of a celebrity paternity suit and the mythology adhered to it, “Exhumation” obsesses over buried memories to create one’s own monster from memory. Re-composed of images chemically treated to disintegrate, the figures peel their identities away to remain as ghosts of what once was. At once a diary of a death mask and of speculative hope, “Exhumation” dives through years of hurt feelings to find that although the body was here, you vanished.

  • First Comes Love

    “First Comes Love” is somewhat like an extended musical number, with perfectly choreographed scenes of four traditional wedding ceremonies accompanied by a schizophrenic but amusing medley of popular love songs. The celebratory atmosphere is interrupted midway through to remind us that there are still a few countries in the world that refuse to legitimize homosexual unions. The film doesn’t attempt to defend – or discredit – the institution of marriage. Instead, it reveals many subtle emotions surrounding the events and raises questions about how the double standard regarding marriage affects both gay and straight couples.

  • Nachlass

    “Nachlass” is the German word for inheritance. It is also the word for posthumously published works. Most commonly, it is used to describe all the things, both the valuables and the junk, left behind in an apartment after its inhabitant has died. In Nachlass the everyday objects of a Ukrainian immigrant to Canada function as placeholders for all of the information that has gone missing between languages and cultures in the process of immigration. However, although this story at the turn of the century is one, which must operate beyond the realm of language, its continuation today in the Germany…

  • UUFO

    “UUFO” consists of six short chapters/stories. Each chapter describes a memory. The film deals with conflicting interpretations of China from the 1960s onwards, contrasting past generations’ stories with my own generation’s interpretations. UUFO stands for Universal Unidentified Flying Object.

  • In a Foreign Country

    A cinematographic transcreation of a text censored in 1968.