Genres: documentary

  • Characters

    Hú Zhǎng Zū writes ancient Chinese poems with water on the ground in Fuxing Park, Shanghai. After a few minutes, the characters dry out and disappear. She comes to the park almost everyday and practices her handwriting with her friends and colleagues. Together they have lively discussions about the strokes and shapes – both amongst each other and with the many spectators. Hú Zhǎng Zū is the only woman within the bustling crowd of men, and due to her calligraphy skills she is respected and highly admired. I come back to see her often, in order to learn from her…

  • Landmarks of Memory

    A tattoo ritual and hookah session memorializes a pre-war flower shop. After seeing its storefront in archival footage of the Lebanese Civil War, a first-generation daughter seeks information and connection to place. Scenes of 1976 Beirut are paired with today’s developed landscape, while roses are etched and coconut coals burn in a snowy diasporic setting.

  • Messengers

    A poetic exploration of three subterranean telescopes in remote regions of Canada, Japan, and Antarctica that reveal a new way of perceiving the universe from within. Underground, we are dreaming into the earth.

  • FIBERS

    This 15-minute hybrid non-fiction/experimental documentary essay blends Lida Mkrtchan’s voiceover testimony about her time in bomb shelters in Shushi (Artsakh/Nagorno-Karabakh) with a layered audiovisual landscape. The film moves between tactile close-ups of the narrator’s hands preparing zhengyalov bread and staged studio compositions in which objects, textures and performative gestures metaphorically reimagine the narrated events and inner states through dark video tableaux. The interplay of documentary and poetic imagery illustrates the resilience of the community under siege, the rhythm of daily life and the quiet actions that sustain hope. Moments of beauty, ritual and shared labour coexist alongside stark reflections on…

  • Memory Rituals [Part Two]: Memory of Trees

    The second in an ongoing, annual series. Thinking about remembering, about forgetting, and about the memory of trees.

  • Both, Instrument & Sound

    Both, Instrument & Sound employs tension as an aesthetic strategy, to explore solidarity, collective struggle, and the transformation of these values under neoliberalism. The film follows the life of Tony over 3 years as he describes his process of political activism from the 1970s onwards, which cannot be disentangled from his friendships and his lovers. The film’s score – co-written with musicians, the film’s cast and crew – sonically explores different interpretations of tension—both in response to Tony’s narration and to the musicians’ existing approaches to tension as a musical, cinematic, scientific, and political experience. Everyone translates, performs and remixes…

  • Monument

    Beginning in ghostly abstraction and accumulating texture by texture into a droning meditative trance, Monument deepens to a visual and sonic intensity, mixing Super 8 film with video footage to create a complicated, multilayered encounter with the tension of protest and reclamation. A vivid and energetic durational experience of collective resistance and celebration. Super 8 footage of the decaying monuments of Presidents Park (Croaker, VA) are layered with video footage captured on Monument Avenue (Richmond, VA) during the Covid-19 pandemic and Black Lives Matter protests of 2020. Themes of registration and re- calibration are explored through form and content and…

  • Second Slide

    4:10 a.m. April 29, 1903. The mining town of Frank, Alberta is awoken by ominous rumblings on Turtle Mountain.

  • Endless Thirst

    Endless Thirst is a deep dive into the otherworldly and misunderstood bog biome. Filmed in Canada, it draws attention to the harm inflicted on these ancient wetlands. An aerial view of a bog in its natural state suddenly sinks into the unimaginable, then appears to evaporate into ghostly images of Sphagnum moss (a bog’s keystone species) imprinted on 16mm film. Endless Thirst alludes to the bog’s reliance on water for survival and humanity’s unquenchable desire for resource and supply. It examines the entanglement of human and more-than-human processes that link to the climate crisis.

  • Canada in the 12th Century

    Two Canadas from the 12th Century. One real, one imaginary.