Genres: docufiction

  • TAKE

    TAKE (te reo Maori: issue, promise, challenge) weaves mana wahine (female knowledge), dance and archival materials to retell the story of the removal of the ancestral Maori meetinghouse, Hinemihi o te Ao Tawhito, from Aotearoa, New Zealand to England in 1892. It is a call to return Hinemihi, embodied by Australian born Maori dancer and performance artist, Victoria Hunt. Set in the liminal spaces between history and emotion TAKE unfolds a story of origins, of traumatic events and colonial violence.

  • Of Beauty & Deities: Music and Dance of India

    Focused on southern Indian classical bharatanatyam dance and music, this hour-long documentary consists mostly of performance and interviews. The performers come from a group called Kalanjali: Dances of India that maintains performers in Chennai, India, and a dance academy in Berkeley, CA, USA. Our documentary was filmed in the San Francisco Bay Area. The group performers come from the dance academy and are mostly young women from the Indian diaspora. The solo dancer, K.P. Yeshoda, as well as the musicians, come from India but traveled to California to join us in the studio. Kalanjali’s directors are the primary interview subjects:…

  • Mrs. Deborah Corde

    A spam email tells the story of a colonial couple and their search for someone to claim their millions. Using archival footage and the melodrama outlined in an email from a junk inbox, worlds of isolation and desperation collide in an ultra short film that brings to life a tale designed to scam someone.

  • still

    A meditation on holding on in isolation, made with a personal cell phone and limited equipment at the beginning of the Coronavirus pandemic in Ottawa.

  • A Letter from Huami

    In 2069, a few rolls of films were found in a regeneration center occasionally. Then scientists extracted the genes from the hair which were left on the films to give a cat -Huami a new life. With human’s consciousness and the memories which belongs to the past time, Huami wrote a letter to her owner in 2019…

  • Xam

    Xam is a sci-fi exploration on the future of surveillance and body hacking. While in the London subway, an unsuspecting man opens a strange text, rendering him unconscious and dragging him through a wormhole. He awakes, lost, on the train tracks in Kiev, Ukraine, unable to communicate with friends or family. With the help of the hacker community in Kiev, and then Paris, the man harnesses alternative virtual transmissions in an attempt to find his way home. Xam is told through an intimate, first-person frame and video collage to emphasize the increasing integration of human and technology. The story is…

  • The Washing Society

    When you drop off a bag of dirty laundry, who’s doing the washing and folding?  THE WASHING SOCIETY brings us into New York City laundromats and the experiences of the people who work there. Collaborating together for the first time, filmmaker Lynne Sachs and playwright Lizzie Olesker observe the disappearing public space of the neighborhood laundromat and the continual, intimate labor that happens there.  Inspired by To ‘Joy My Freedom author Tera Hunter’s depiction of the 1881 organization of African-American laundresses in Atlanta, Sachs and Olesker’s film THE WASHING SOCIETY investigates the intersection of history, underpaid work, immigration, and the…

  • The Eyes of Summer

    In a small and remote hamlet in Southern Sri Lanka, a little girl develops a curious friendship with a spirit who lives in an abandoned house. This film was shot in my mother’s village in Southern Sri Lanka—shortly after the civil war in 2010. Collaboratively developed with members of my family there, a narrative was improvised around an investigation into my mother’s interactions with spirits in the community during her childhood. Landing somewhere between horror fiction and “spectral” ethnography, the film describes a population reeling from devastations of the past, where distinctions between the living and the dead are thinning.

  • Imitation of Life

    Conceptually informed by Trinh T. Minh-ha’s seminal film “Reassemblage,” this short piece describes an impressionistic encounter with a woman seen from a great distance, who shields her face from a curious telescopic lens whose gaze is confused by an unknown force.

  • sway

    A sequel to the pandemic-themed reflection “still”, “sway” explores the seductive – and destructive – pull of fear.