Film Format: Super 8

  • And Then We Marched

    Filmmaker Lynne Sachs shoots Super 8mm film of the Jan. 21 Women’s March in Washington, D.C. and intercuts this recent footage with archival material of early 20th Century Suffragists marching for the right to vote, 1960s antiwar activists and 1970s advocates for the Equal Rights Amendment. Sachs then talks about the experience of marching with her seven-year old neighbor who offers disarmingly insightful observations on the meaning of their shared actions. Screenings: Other Cinema, San Francisco; Workers Unite Film Festival, 2019 KOSMA Gwangju International organized by the Korean Society of Media & Arts

  • Day Residue

    I spent a day with my mother and stepfather shooting Super 8mm film in my childhood home in Memphis, Tennessee. Sigmund Freud believed that that the instigation of a dream is often to be found in the events of the day preceding the dream, which he called the “day residue.” Screening: Filmoteca Español

  • Believe

    Using photo-booth animation, two girls try to put together a patchy faith.

  • The Initiation Well

    The Quinta da Regaleira in Sintra, Portugal is a huge estate that has two wells for performing initiation ceremonies built into the ground. This film takes us into one of them. Sound design by Samuel La France.

  • The Way We Are

    “The Way We Are” shares excerpts of stories from audio interviews with 4 queer Asian women living in Toronto: Katherine Chun, Wenda Li, Tamai Kobayashi, and Nancy Seto. Told in the present-tense, these stories are arranged in a way that explores the past as the present, and in doing so, immersing viewers into the real-lived experiences from a different generation. This film was inspired by the intimacy of looking through a photo album with loved ones; there is something nostalgic about the materiality of handling photographs, especially in this digital era where images are so increasingly ubiquitous. The act of…

  • Autoritratto

    A short piece commissioned by Antimatter Media Art, a “portrait of the artist by the artist”, first exhibited as part of Automat compilation. It consists of recycled 8mm footage of Canadian landscapes, mixed materials, ink and film cement. As an immigrant, looking for, and collecting, past images of Canada is a way of imagining a past that I don’t have in this country. The re-writing of the self is produced through the archive of others via associative montage.

  • A Life on the Borderlands

    This is a film about my father, who immigrated to Montreal from Chile in the early 1970s after a hard-scrabble life on the streets of Santiago as a youth. Like my mother, who immigrated from Argentina around that time, his mobile life was characterised by neither chain migration nor lasting social ties with members of his ethnic group. His story is also a story about class, politics, and complicated histories of migration and exile.

  • Orgy of the Blood Parasites

    J. G. Ballard’s novel High-Rise and Cronenberg’s film Shivers, both of which detail an apartment building’s descents into chaos, were released in 1975, creating a collision in history as fascinating as it is bizarre. Both are about non-normative sex in imposing spatialities and both are visions of disturbed surrealist dystopia of body mutations. Later in his career, in 1996, Cronenberg adapted a J. G. Ballard novel with the fetishistic film Crash, but in Shivers, dread and disgust circulate spatially around the apartment complex on Nun’s Island, next to the city of Montréal, to which I have returned. I bring together…

  • The Places We Lived

    The Places We Lived uses a large family archive of Super8 and digital home movies from the mid-1970s to late 1990s to grapple with the hopes, dreams, and disappointments of two South American immigrants who moved to Montreal in the wake of the excitement and optimism generated by Expo ’67. This story focuses on the father, Jose (“Pepe”), whose life in Canada followed four hardscrabble decades in Chile. A story about childhood and fatherhood, aging, capitalism, and obsolescence, The Places We Lived opens up new questions about class, memory, diasporic narratives, and the complicated histories of migration and exile.

  • 7FF on¢idia

    In ancient China the skin of the tiger was the representation of “continuous changing”; in Mayan world through the path of Bolom Chon (Jaguar) they could read constellations: the dance of cosmos. Fluxes are grouped in the film; spotted-jaguar, “7 pancadas”, speckled plants, ounce (oz), “golden spider”. Matter-energy-information varies. Side by side communication, surplus value of code. Commodities, bit coins, mountains of data. 7FF on¢idia: real impossibilia of capital life.