Film Format: Digital File

  • Solarization

    An experiment in solarization filmed at the Independent Imaging Retreat in Mount Forest, Canada.

  • Mindtease

    The accidental reveal of a burlesque dancer’s “true” identity leads to a moment of self-questioning for the audience, and for one voyeur in particular, some deeper self-exploration.

  • DOH! OH DEAR, A FEMALE TEAR!

    Using the voice as a metaphor for political voice, Stephen Chen traces his journey as a male mezzo, faced with prejudice and marginalization back in Singapore, and later in North America. The schooling and suppression of his voice becomes interwoven with his experiences of colonialism and exile. Playing with the biography documentary form, DOH! OH DEAR, A FEMALE TEAR! brackets issues of voice / gender / representation as Stephen traces his westernization, the discovery and silencing of his voice, and people’s reactions in Singapore and North America. Reflecting on the “unsettling” quality of his voice, Stephen decided to exploit the…

  • Une Terre familière

    Where is there to belong to? To not feel strange? To not ask permission? Ground. Home. A familiar land. Une Terre familière is structured as a series of long-take vignettes, each centered around a site purposing a collision of nature and artifice. Within highly manicured environments, these sites attempt to imitate natural processes and un-peopled ecosystems and to preserve and manage elements of nature. The figures in Une Terre familière struggle to do their best with what they have- to find their own sun at the tanning salon, their own clouds in the steam room- to improve, to connect, to…

  • Explorations of an Unexpected Time Traveler

    Explorations of an Unexpected Time Traveler imagines a narrative where a woman from some undisclosed point in the past experiences continual unexplained and uncontrollable shifts in time and space. Suddenly finding herself in unfamiliar spaces, seemingly devoid of other people, she explores the various regions recording her discoveries through moving image, sound recordings and photographs along the way. Shot in various cities & counties in Alberta; Colorado; and Yukon Territory. Conceived while in Dawson City, Yukon Territory while an Artist in Residence at the Klondike Institute for Art and Culture (KIAC), March 2013. [Installation version includes a series of over…

  • Pigeon Hole

    Pigeon Hole comically expresses the filmmaker’s desire to set fire to the restrictive and reductive labels gays use to categorize one another and themselves, especailly via modern methods of hooking up such as online websites and apps. A proclamation of liberation from marginalizing stereotypes and sexual exclusvitiy, the video features labels and descriptors culled from online profiles paired with footage of pigeons and the filmmaker burning down a large birdhouse. The Inside Out LGBT Film Festival commissioned Pigeon Hole for the “In Your Pocket: What’s Your Sex?” project challenging selected filmmakers to shoot and create a short video work utilizing…

  • Finding a Place to Sleep

    Based on stories my grandmother told me, I re-imagine while working as a cleaner the experiences of my ancestors during the Holodomor (forced famine) in Ukraine during the Stalinist-Soviet era. The “film” image is re-invented through digital video to enact a sense of ambiguity between authenticity and fiction, as can also be present in the act of oral storytelling. This is one chapter in “Stories for a Future Generation,” a series of shorts which together tell the stories of my family’s and my own migrations, and the inter-generational impacts of those upon our lives and on those of our family’s…

  • After the Circus

    An exploration into 19th century death mystiques, which rely heavily on the supernatural, along with a belief in, or at least a fascination with, fairy magic, much of it implied through subtle imagery. In all, it is a fascinating and astonishingly replete compendium of spiritual endeavor–the 19th century literary body of work that is, along with such masterful illustrators as Gustave Dore and others. These authors were passionately interested in what is noble and what is depraved, a far cry from present day ethics. Music by Messiaen.

  • Sunspots and Solar Flares

    Sunspots and Solar Flares combines found footage of children dancing from a 1968 Toronto educational film with excerpts of Robin Armstrong’s Nuclear war 1984?

  • The Weight of Snow

    A home movie of a trip to Chernobyl, a dying matriarch and a set of troubling personal circumstances, The Weight of Snow is an essay documenting memory, time and place. A film referencing the tradition of personal travelogue films of The Escarpment School and the essay style of Sans Soleil, The Weight of Snow travels from Canada to Chernobyl from the perspective of a young man exploring radiation in the midst of death, cancer and emotional turmoil. A collection of all techniques used throughout the Lion series, The Weight of Snow is the centerpiece of the work. Echoing the collage…