Film Format: Super 8

  • Isolamento

    Shot on wonderful Super 8, “Isolamento” is a grand culmination of the themes: isolation, fear, beauty, gluttony, assimilation, environment and sexuality, merged into one great stream of consciousness. An ever changing zoetrope of scenes flowing from one to another. At its heart is a mother who feels like she’s enabling her son’s mental illness with any action she takes, driving him further into darkness. A father who grinds away at a life that has him on his knees. He yearns for the way out, wishing to return to a more natural way of life. A son who’s so fed up…

  • Catalyst

    Being natural born pattern seekers, we are forever looking for this or that clue to help explain what otherwise might appear unfathomable. Fundamentally Catalyst represents a type of diary without dates, of memories reconstructed to formulate my story. A story that takes place in time and space, shaped by the earth and sky Merging super 8 mm footage that I filmed many years ago with some of my more recent DSLR/HDV tape footage, Catalyst investigates how each medium shaped my story as well as the gaps in time when each sequence was filmed. Filmed on location by Kent Tate: Toronto,…

  • The Earth in the Sea

    Videoed off projected super 8 footage, this short film in four parts (titles from Artaud: “ the earth in the sea, the air in the earth, the fire in the water, the water in the air”) is suggestive of, on some level, the interrelatedness of everything. Porous, fleshy, granular atoms of existence, mutable unending energy, pulsing, beating, burning, blurring, clarifying, obscuring, revealing – fleeting.

  • Saint Bathans Repetitions

    A series of cinematic portraits of Jacques Larose shot in domestic spaces in the former gold-mining town of Saint Bathans, New Zealand expand into a tapestry of glistening natural light and vaporous movement, created via a painstaking process of in-camera layering effects. “Shot in a saloon and horse stables in the former gold mining town of St. Bathans, New Zealand, the film drifts between representation and graphic abstraction as these cinematic portraits, which are layered in-camera, multiply the solitary figure through temporal diffraction.” – IMAGES Festival Selected Screenings: International Film Festival Rotterdam (2018), Images Festival (Toronto, ON, 2018), Crossroads Festival…

  • Sira

    ‘Sira’, in Arabic, literally translated, means biography. Arabs are a people known for their oral tradition. Through excavated footage and narration, Sira examines the displacement of a family, beginning with the event that catapulted their exodus from Kuwait as a result of the Iraqi invasion.

  • SHE IS THE OTHER GAZE

    Every encounter with an image, every interaction searches for its own form. SHE IS THE OTHER GAZE describes the encounter with female visual artists mostly of an older generation who were part of the Viennese art scene in the 1970s and were engaged in the women’s movement. In dialogue with the filmmaker and her camera they share early works and artistic practices. They remember how their self-determination evolved between artistic ambitions, economic constraints, adaptation and resistance to the prevailing patriarchal social structures. In their role as feminist pioneers the protagonists are a great influence on the contemporary art scene and…

  • BLU In YOU

    Walter Benjamin suggests that film is comparable to surgery, the instrument allowing the operator to penetrate the body of the subject while, paradoxically, maintaining his or her distance. This statement self-reflexively sets up the female spectator at the helm of the art-installation opening of Blu in You—an eloquent essayist film with visual conversations that dissects historical and contemporary representations of the black female body, sexuality and subjectivity. The female spectator (Melanie Smith), views the staged art installation conversations between visual arts curator (Andrea Fatona) and writer (Nalo Hopkinson). The conversations begin with a cultural history of violence, ethnographic display and…

  • The Bed and the Street

    A love story set in the global anti-austerity demonstrations. As citizens take back their streets, two women meet and fall in love. What geometry of desire will help overthrow the state? What micro-politics of sharing and communality will provide fuel for demonstrations that will remove and replace the neo-liberal consensus? Cast in a palimpsest of images and sounds, as if there were no way to separate inside and out, the street and the bedroom.

  • Heads or Tails

    “Heads or Tails” is composed of the heads and tails clipped from black-and-white Super 8 films Kyle has hand-processed over the years. The clips were arranged by flipping a quarter 8 times and then splicing in either a head or a tail selected at random, as determined by the coin toss.

  • Vapor

    “Vapor” is an insubstantial film – diffused matter suspended in air – a cinematic dew point where time and space are distorted and compressed. Pinhole images coalesce into something recognizable and just as quickly fade into the mist of emulsion from which they came.