Genres: documentary

  • mirrored

    This is a Buddhist Slow Movie. A marsh in a high mountain valley in British Columbia.The impermanence of existence. Disease, aging, death. The location is home to a Thai Theravada Forest Monastery.Sound: Chanting in Pali and in Sinhala.

  • From Neurons to Nirvana: The Great Medicines

    Featuring interviews with the world’s foremost researchers, writers, and pioneers in psychedelic psychotherapy — these soul healers and scientific investigators are using everything from ancient decoctions to LSD and MDMA/Ecstasy as essential medicines, proposing that they be made available for research and therapeutic use.

  • A More Radiant Sphere

    A More Radiant Sphere tells the long-lost story of Communist poet, activist and Canadian political prisoner Joe Wallace, bringing him to life through archival material, both real and imagined. This hybrid film is shot primarily on 16mm film and weaves together the story of Wallace, the failed Canadian Communist Party, and the filmmaker’s own surprising discovery of her relation to Wallace through a distant relationship with her father (Joe’s great-nephew). Segmented throughout are folk songs based on Wallace’s writings, performed by award-winning folk musician Simone Schmidt, aka Fiver. The film delves into the limits of history and its records, and…

  • Currents / Perpendicolare Avanti

    Currents / Perpendicolare Avanti is a camera-less, hand-made, 16mm film collage, based on the artist’s autobiographical experience as an immigrant. In three movements, the film explores the dynamics of inhabiting the in-between space of moving between multiple countries and their temporalities, through visual and sound abstraction, interlacing and recycling pre-existing film materials and, using fragments from anonymous orphan films. Utilizing these so-called scraps, Currents is a film of extensive remediation, treated by hand through the use of the emulsion lifting technique, thereby re-imagining, re-constructing, and de-constructing the liminality of immigrant life. The re-writing of the self in Currents is produced…

  • Skyscraper Film

    Can I use the film strip structure as an architectural element? Is it possible to use the celluloid from the film as a cement? Can these skyscrapers be turned into something else? Can solid lines blend into sensual, natural curves? Can I melt skyscrapers? Skyscraper Film was created to try to give a visual answer to these questions, arising from the artist’s relation to urban maps of various locations and their respective skylines, populated by imposing skyscrapers and reinforced concrete panoramas: Quebec, Kingston (Canada), Maryland, Pittsburgh, Baltimore (USA) etc. Cities are presented to us as an abstract handmade camera-less collage,…

  • Negative / Positive Film

    Negative / Positive Film is a hand-made, camera-less collage film composed of layers of erotic 16mm films from the 1920s, 1940s, and 1970s, intermingled with nature documentaries and layers of organic materials. This visual abstraction merges together both positive black-and-white film and its negative black-and-white counterpart – on the same film base. This allows the film to exist in two versions, one positive and, the other negative. The film is an abstract remediation of female bodies dislodged from their original erotic context and ripped away from their male co-protagonists. The man is removed from the picture, while the female body…

  • Self-Portrait in Hell

    Self-Portrait in Hell is a hybrid film that combines analog and digital film manipulation techniques. Multiple layers of 8mm films and disparate fragments are amalgamated to create a self-portrait of the director. A singular self-portrait, since ironically the subject of the film is not the director but the image found in abandoned film archives, the image of another, unknown woman. The first layer is from a 1970s 8mm home movie titled Woman Dancing with Dog and was found in an antique shop. The second layer is an 8mm film belonging to an unknown archive, which the artist buried for a…

  • Hoa

    Before developing her memory disorders, my grandmother Trần Thị Tuyết Hoa wrote an autobiographical book about her life and its events. The book is titled “Hồi Ức Tuyết Hoa” (Memories of Tuyết Hoa), and subtitled “Khi Đất Nước Tôi Thanh Bình: Hồi ức của một nữ sinh viên Sài Gòn” (When My Country is Peaceful: Memoirs of a Saigon Female Student). She now reads this book everyday in her Hanoi home. In the form of a poetic letter, this short film is dedicated to her, from me, a grandchild.

  • Blood on The Square: Surviving Rabaa

    Blood on The Square: Surviving Rabaa is a documentary about the Rabaa massacre in Egypt, described by Human Rights Watch as “one of the world’s largest killings of demonstrators in a single day in recent history.” Canadian-Egyptian filmmaker, Mohamed Dawood, who witnessed and survived the military-led massacre embarks on a journey of healing by seeking out other survivors who were present in Rabaa on that fateful day.

  • Harris Project, The

    In 1996, four young filmmakers graduate from post-secondary studies to find a provincial government that has implemented a “Common Sense Revolution.” This film follows the filmmakers’ personal struggles as they try to complete a low-budget, short documentary about a right wing governmental plan that will forever change the economic landscape of Ontario.