Film Format: Super 8

  • Sonnet (for the dear ones)

    A short film poem influenced by traditional sonnet structure and tone. Sonnet as elegy, a lament for the loss of close others whose deaths always arrive too soon. Presence and memory interwoven with grief, the transitoriness of daily life, the moments when the loved one appears in an imagined exchange.

  • a decade

    a decade is an experimental film that fuses analog and digital techniques and reflects on the artist’s life through the 1980s.—a time of rebellion, discovery, and loss. Blending Super 8 and 16mm film, digital animation and personal reflection, the film drifts from the raw urgency of punk rock to the glittering pulse of gay discos. Bookended by the deaths of his two closest friends, it’s a haunting and poetic elegy to a transformative era, where identity and community thrived amidst the shadows.

  • Marked

    Marked is an experimental film that merges Super 8 and 16mm formats to examine the presence of queer intimacy. At its center are two shirtless men, locked in an embrace, dancing — a quiet yet radical act. Overlaid with hand-inked 16mm film, their bodies become both seen and obscured, highlighted and erased. Through this layered process, Marked reflects on how queer love is shaped, celebrated, and scarred by the society that surrounds it.

  • 敬祖 ·PAYING RESPECTS

    ‘敬祖 ·PAYING RESPECTS’ is a short film using the Chinese ritual of burning joss paper to reflect on questions of death & diaspora. Yiqing explores her grief by offering her ancestors everything they couldn’t afford. Everything she burns gets sent to the afterlife. The film plays with themes of memory, distance and dreams.

  • Absence

    “This film is about ‘nothing.’ Hints of dramatic ‘loss’ are imaged throughout, but the primary effect of the film is to give, through fleeting and ephemeral visions, a sense of something which almost exists but unhappily doesn’t.” – Marilyn Jull

  • In the Alcove, at the Place

    For “In the Alcove, at the Place” Davis went back to the alcove (a private place in her room) and the place (the four corners of an intersection in Toronto, consisting of a house, two grocery stories, and a coin wash) every couple of weeks for nine months. In her alcove she filmed herself sitting in a chair; at the place she filmed aspects of its everyday life, making discoveries about it and becoming friendly with some of its inhabitants. In both alcove and place, there is change but also repetition. Among other things, the film concerns her growing familiarity…

  • Introducing Elwy

    A silent “talking heads” film. Elwy Yost as a purely physical presence as he talks to the camera, often in extreme close-up.

  • Lady in a Chair

    This film documents the tragedy of senility as it affects the life of an elderly woman. Whereas she was once in command of language (and culture), she is now victimized by her inability to interact with it. The objects in her home offer no comfort; rather they combine to illustrate the imprisoning nature of her state. She questions the meaning of her continued existence and pleads for help that can never come. The voice used is that of the woman whose plight the film describes; the words are hers and, with two exceptions, the voice was recorded “straight.” Originally shot…

  • Making a Scene

    Offers passersby the opportunity to don a mask and become either an elephant or a mosquito. A look at people’s inhibitions.

  • Mine’s Bedlam

    Life is like a gigantic phonograph record fifty feet across. Or like one of those whirling discs at the old amusement park. You get on the disc and it’s spinning and the faster it goes, the more centrifugal force builds up to throw you off it. The speed on the outer edge of the disc is so great you have to hold on for dear life just to stay on. The closer you get to the center of the disc, the slower the speed is and the easier it is to stand up. In fact, at the very center there…