Film Format: Digital File

  • Grandmothers

    A lyrical documentary that lends deep listening to, and seeks universal wisdom from, three formidable older women from diverse communities living on Prince Edward Island. “Grandmothers” explores the worlds of three women who have reached a formidable age. It gently seeks universal wisdom through their specific tales of hardship and humour. In response to these stories, three young artists (a dancer, a musician and an animator) weave their work throughout the film. “Grandmothers” demonstrates the richness that can be derived from intergenerational relationships and subtly attempts to address the lack of intergenerational spaces in popular North American culture.

  • sway / pull

    Created during the COVID-19 pandemic when queer spaces were disappearing across Toronto, sway / pull is a meditation on the erosion of Hanlan’s point beach in both literal and figurative senses. Hanlan’s Point Beach, located on the Toronto Islands, was the site of Toronto first gay pride celebrations in 1970s and remains a queer haven today. Additionally, the Toronto Islands have faced poor city planning that has led to a significant amount of erosion on the beach. This film plays with the concept of erosion by the physical pushing of sand to speak back to the literal erosion of the…

  • fuck

    A short solo film made in quarantine, “fuck” is part silent meditation, part protest, part magic spell for a better world.

  • RETRODREAMING

    “Retrodreaming” examines the common phenomenon of ghostly, abandoned schools due to demographic change in the countryside of Japan. Empty schools in deserted villages tell their own story – whether during the pandemic, after a nuclear catastrophe, or just due to depopulation. The film references the Japanese tradition of telling “Kaidan “(ghost stories/scary stories) and the multiple school-themed “Kaidan” (Gakkō no Kaidan, Japanese for “Scary School Story”) in Japanese mainstream culture, which encompass the idea of entities and memories remaining in these architectures. The film focuses on the visual quality of the Showa-era architecture of the abandoned Sawada School in Nakanojo.…

  • Events in the Tunnel

    Drawn from Super 8 films in the artists’ personal archives as well as found amateur 8mm footage, “Events in the Tunnel” presents an absurdist abbreviated retelling of Canada’s colonial history as defined by that great colonial trope, the cross-country train trip. In the transitional void of a train tunnel, we witness familiar 19th and 20th century paradigms of white middle-class conformity as represented by images of travel, amusement, and domesticity, with Canadian culture embodied by a chimeric portrayal of the early 20th century painter Tom Thomson.

  • HK Uprising

    A tribute to the ongoing protests in Hong Kong that are taking place three decades after the Tiananmen Square uprising. Note: This film can be displayed as a multi-channel installation with May 35.

  • 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.

  • Rema Nascentes (Rheme maining sources)

    A place-specific film-excavation of the Bixiga neighorhood in São Paulo. Choreography of forces that cross present time. Filmancy, clairvoyance is the vision of what is taking shape. Allegory: lobby-color, speculates. Hollow in the heart of the city, a rock. A bird ‘rappina’ lands. Novelty: Quilombo, alley, dealers: step. Vai-Vai samba school’s black and white banner. Pictograms from Benjamin’s “The Arcades project”. Progress: plugging a river while it’s possible. Commodity: Matarazzo & Metro. The real state of things, real estate: banning organic. Ground- quotation, avocados, blue taroes, water tanks, oxum: (cosmo) political reaction. Rheme maining sources: life asking for passage.

  • [Être]

    [Être] was a thrift shop and eventually underground screening space in Montreal’s Mile End district. The space featured as its main attraction objects picked-up on garbage nights and accrued over many years by proprietor-curators Alek Gruszczynski et Ewa Zbroch. To be inside [Être] was like being hermetically sealed-off with a proliferation of objects, and objects containing objects, an accumulation of things and surfaces and scents that invariably activate all the senses. Shot in the basement and on the main floor of [Être] just before it closed its doors forever, this film gives a sense of what it was like to…

  • The world is blue at its edges

    “What could I tell you about the world I live in?” Addressing her unborn child, the narrator tries to find answers partly through claustrophobic pictures interwoven with intimate notes on a pregnancy in times of a pandemic. Based on a childhood memory, this experimental short film spans from the Cold War Iron Curtain, to the so-called “refugee crisis,” and the renewed closing of borders during COVID-19. Textures of walls closing in blur with pixelated maps, creating a subjective portrait of a new reality and its digital image-world. // “Iris Blauensteiner’s and Christine Moderbacher’s ‘The world is blue at its edges’…