Film Format: Digital File

  • One Hundred Attempts to Make a Film About Depression

    Four years ago I began working on what was supposed to be a documentary about living with depression. In the end, if there is anything harder than having a conversation about depression, it is making a film about it. After numerous shoots, interviews, restarts, and stages of abandonment, I created this piece. The film is an attempt at translating the emotional state of depression, as I experience it. Filmed almost entirely on the Phantom slow motion camera at 1500 frames per second, 100 Attempts To Make a Film About Depression represents an ongoing struggle to be open about coping with…

  • Blair’s Last Day

    Blair Maddox has been projecting IMAX films at the Space & Science Centre in Edmonton, Canada for almost 30 years. ‘Blair’s Last Day’ documents his last day on the job before the IMAX theatre switches to a digital projection system, leaving Blair unemployed after projecting over 30,000 films.

  • A Celebration of Darkness

    A woman with a tortured past is triggered to take an unexpected walk down memory lane, she finds herself face-to- face with her inner child. Giving her a chance to make peace with her past. Does she find a way to celebrate darkness or does she become engulfed forever by it? In 2015, Jaene turned 40. This lead her to become introspective about her unusual life history. From a childhood of severe abuse, neglect, psychiatric institutionalization and being in care, she grew to become a street involved sex worker by 20. She met Elder, Isaac Day from Serpent River First…

  • Helium

    Commissioned by the 8 Fest for its 10-year anniversary, “Helium” is a dual-projector work that explores the worlds of competitive bodybuilding and balloon fetish. Originating from a deep fascination of the ability to derive such intense pleasure from otherwise innocuous objects or activities, “Helium” observes inflation, lust, and explosion.

  • Somnium Lapidum (Dream Stones)

    This stop-motion 16mm film offers an audiovisual meditation on the material animation of stones. The concept is inspired by Camillo Leonardi’s “Speculum Lapidum”, published in 1533, which describes the magical healing virtues of a variety of stones, categorized by colour. The character-based animated vignettes are inspired by the woodcuts in “De Hortus Sanitatis”, a natural history encyclopedia published in 1485, which details various methods of harnessing the power of gems. It was believed at the time that a given gem’s powers could be absorbed through focused viewing. Proposing an analogy between this belief and attraction to cinema, this film offers…

  • Lily Eng’s First Thursday

    Lily Eng was a progenitor of the first wave of Toronto performance art and experimental dance in the early 1970s. she was mostly Female Warrior rather than Tutu’d Princess—using deeply exploratory movement techniques, plus hardcore performance art concepts. Eng was cutting edge, defying ethnic and anti-feminist prejudices. Surfing on a wave of acclaim, she was one of few from the scene to establish an intercontinental reputation. The film’s title comes from Lily Eng’s First Thursday performance at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Canada, in 2016. She was there by invitation, but it was 39 years since the 1977 Documenta 6…

  • The Promise

    Set in an open field, the two men dance, jumping from reality to dream, as they follow a path, a metaphor for structure in their pursuits, giving meaning to their struggles.

  • DataMine

    “DataMine” is a stop-motion indictment of surveillance society; laboriously animated by hand with light painting to create surreal imagery without the use of computer generated images. Society embraces an ever-increasing connection to technology, creating digital communities that distract us from our real world existence. As our lives exist more and more in the digital realm, they are catalogued and stored for future mining by corporations and governments. This activity of data mining raises many questions regarding the future of activism and creativity – that which makes us human. In the intricate world of “DataMine,” the oblivious masses are catalogued and…

  • I Want To Kill Myself

    Contemplating suicide: a biography.

  • Membrana Mortis (Dead Film)

    “Membrana Mortis” is a meta-film, a chaotic assemblage of re-photographed and chemically manipulated image fragments culled from a damaged roll of film that was nearly un-projectable. The films title suggests a two-fold intention – here process and existence pre-suppose one another, at once an elegy to a dead film and observance of new genesis. This film was commissioned by the Independent Filmmakers Cooperative of Ottawa with support from the Canada Council for the Arts for Origin 8, a program commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Super 8 format.