Film Format: 35mm
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Shadow Tracing
A young Chinese woman challenged by identity and history, but enchanted with retro filmmaking in a digital world, makes a life decision – to purchase a vintage, hand-crank movie camera. The camera recalls images of wacky “Hollywood Chinatowns” from Hollywood films made in Colonialist times. While examining it, and dreaming of becoming a cameraman herself, she discovers the marks of former Chinese owners, and she envisions historical scenes that the camera may have seen in China. Her wishes are fulfilled as she films the streets of her own hood, in Toronto’s Asian community.
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Firefly, A
Based on a poem by Souvankham Thammavongsa, “A Firefly” plays with words, letters and optical sound. Produced for LIFT Poetry Projections 2007.
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RH Factor
A short film about crossing bridges, crossing the positive and the negative, and the unpredictability of love and new lives.
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Bonne mère
Alfred leaves the north of France to find his estranged mother who’s become a prostitute in Marseille. He changes his identity and begins hooking in order to be close to her. “Bonne Mère” is a nostalgic poem of longing. Selected Screenings: 2008 Berlin International Film Festival
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Foodie
Born into a murky world, jettisoned into flourescence, Foodie is all emotion, all merchandise, all pressure and all pleasure. Foodie waddles through emotional worlds that are hungry and stuffed, cozy-mean, cocooned and exposed. Foodie is the perfect consumer who is simultaneously socially conscious and suspect. Watch Foodie, struggling to stay within boundaries of good and proper, worrying all the time, trying to live forever with too much and not enough.
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Chronicle Re-Constructions
“I believe that filmmakers in the future will have to establish an archaeological approach to their subject matter. Instead of photographing images, we may have to dig them from the ground, and paste them together – film will look like today’s Dead Sea Scrolls.” – Steven Woloshen
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Cut
“Cut” is a short animated film about a woman who gets a haircut on lunch and gets more than she bargained for.
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Afghanimation
Women in Afghan refugee camps make woven rugs that tell a story of war. The intent of these rugs is unclear. Are they anti-war or an affirmation of military power? Are they made as tourist trinkets for soldiers and “peacekeepers,” or are they somber prayer rugs? The weavers of these rugs are anonymous to Western collectors because the rugs are attained through intricate channels of trade. This kind of silencing of the artists’ voices and the political ambivalence of their intent can be read as a metaphor for the Canadian military presence in Afghanistan. “Canadians don’t know what the Canadian…
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Optical Itzak
My son, Itzak, looks at everything…Maybe this is what he sees.
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Block B
A building becomes a living painting. The concrete homes and contradicting soundscapes frame the lives of an expatriate Indian community in Malaysia. “The grand scale of an aging modernist apartment block in the Brickfields neighbourhood of Kuala Lumpur sets the stage for a macroscopic analysis of the quotidian activities of its inhabitants. Seemingly trivial actions assume significant meaning as lives entwine between the rigid lines of the building. Observational cinema at its extreme, ‘Block B’ reveals much about the social structure of the Indian working class in the outskirts of a Malaysian metropolis.” – Alex Rogalski, Toronto International Film Festival…
