Film Format: 16mm

  • My Niagara

    “An inspired and resonant portrait of tenuous teen sensuality emerging from seamless suburban facades.” – David McIntosh, Toronto Festival of Festivals “‘My Niagara’ is definitely set in Toronto for people who know Toronto. But I wanted it to be read both ways, the character to be either Japanese Canadian or Japanese American. It’s also a matter of political self-definition, of what it means to be Asian American or Asian Canadian… It’s a matte of dissolving boundaries, about collapsing categories, as much as about self definition.” – Helen Lee, Fuse Magazine, Fall 1993

  • Babies on the Sun

    “Babies on the Sun” offers nostalgic, weathered images of “childhood” inspired by the song of the same name by the band Sparklehorse. The textured and layered style of the film gives the impression of blurred memories floating in the subconscious mind. The images, half visible, are abstracted through a process of visual degradation, suggesting the effect of time on memory, and mystified through collage, revealing the non-linear configurations of memory where images dwell in interesting and emotionally cumulative juxtapositions.

  • Dust

    “Dust” is an interpretation of choreographic work of Julia Sasso. The film portrays the intimate physical relationship of two dancers. The interpretive shooting style of the film unveils the emotional drama between the subjects.

  • Phone Comes to Jammu, A

    When her relatives in India finally gets a phone, a young woman contemplates how this “new” technology will narrow or widen the gap between her lesbian diasporic self and her relatives overseas. Does easy access guarantee closeness?

  • Thirst

    “Tammy Ballaban wants to leave her mark, to be remembered, to stay safe. So she stops eating. ‘Thirst’ is an unconventional and beautifully structured meditation about eating disorders, hunger and desire, our need for identity, and control. A sumptuous collage of image and sound reflects the amorphous dialectic between conscious and unconscious drives.” – Lynne Fernie Selected screenings: Documentary Channel (Ontario), broadcast, 2006; Toronto Worldwide Short Film Festival, 2002; Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival, Toronto, 2002; Taiwan International Documentary Film Festival, 2002.

  • C’est la vie

    “A mini-presentation of consciousness dealing with cosmos. The world in a grain of sand. Connections between life, death, and the world are neither static nor symmetrical but flowing and intuitive. The movement of emulsion through which images are seen is like the mind trying to retrieve and put things together. “C’est la vie” is a positive muscular little thing.” – Rae Davis Sound by Rainer Wiens.

  • Luminous

    Film as history, propaganda, time travel, and the movement of light.

  • Sexual Meditations: Office Suite

    This film evolves from several years’ observation of the sexual energy, which charges the world of business and the qualities of palatial environ which this energy often creates. It is one of the most perfect films that has been given to me to make. (SB)

  • Sexual Meditations: Hotel

    This film takes its cue from that ultimate situation of Sex/Med/masturbation – the loft-and-lonely hotel room. It is thus easily twice the length and complexity of any other in the series. (SB)

  • He Was Born, He Suffered, He Died

    The quote is Joseph Conrad answering a critic who found his books too long. Conrad replied that he could write a novel on the inside of a match-book cover, thus (as above), but that he “preferred to elaborate.” The “Life” of the film is scratched on black leader. The “elaboration” of colour tonalities is as the mind’s eye responds to hieroglyph. (SB)