Genres: documentary

  • Looking For Carmen

    “In his most ravishing and heartbreaking work, Arriaga ventures again to his native Peru in search of a lost friend. Along the way he encounters the faces of those who speak about wounds that cannot heal—survivors recounting the deaths and disappearances of their beloveds during Peru’s civil war that pitted the communists of The Shining Path against the government, with both sides aligned against the people. “The dead have called us to find them,” remarks Lida Flores de Huaman, and Marcos follows her evocation, cutting memory trails into Peru that bring back the names of the disappeared. Using frames that…

  • Occidente

    A film-poem of an ecology of sings that speak of a colonial history repeating itself. Subalterns become masters, antiques become reproducible dinner sets, exotic birds become luxury currency, exploration becomes extreme-sport-tourism, monuments become geo-data. A spherical voyage eastwards and westwards marking cycles of expansion in a struggle to find one’s place, one’s sitting around a table. “An ecology of signs lurking amid seductive 16mm travel footage echoes with post-colonial reverberations in Ana Vaz’s deceptively corrosive, award-winning Occidente. – ANDRÉA PICARD (TIFF, Wavelengths)

  • Fading Away

    For my family a way of life has faded away, even the memories are fading. I am left with fragments of stories, old photographs, and knick knacks. I never lived on that farm. I will never live there, except through the memories of others. (Elaine Pain)

  • Appropriated, The

    THE APPROPRIATED was shot in several mega shopping malls with a hidden camera during the annual pre-Christmas crush. An ongoing thread in Dudar’s films is patterned movement, sometimes choreographed, but in this case found and manipulated in post-production. A myriad of editing techniques reveal shamanistic-like rituals in the everyday actions and behaviors of the shoppers. First unnoticed, small gestures are revealed and turned into mystic hand signals. Sometimes the shoppers cross into mysterious dimensions, deftly undermining our comprehension of spacetime. Abetted by the editing, a preponderance of reflective glass throughout challenges our perception of what is real, and what is…

  • Derby and Groma

    While taking a stroll in Buenos Aires on his birthday several years ago, photo collector Pablo Cruz Aguirre came across an unusual gift. Blowing down the street towards him was a collection of letters, postcards and photos depicting a performing duo named Derby and Groma. This collection of artifacts contained a fragmented narrative of two people. Desolina Merlino, alias Derby, was born 1891 and of Italian descent. Samuel Salomón Gromatzky, alias Groma, was the son of Jewish immigrants in Argentina, born in 1895. Under the name of Derby and Groma, the two performed acrobatic dance routines in variety theaters throughout…

  • Clear and No Screws

    Clear and No Screws profiles SendAPackage, a wholesale warehouse founded by ex-prisoner Chris Barrett where all of the items sold meet the 36-page list of rules regulating packages allowed into the New York prison system. From pattern-less boxer shorts to hip hop cassette tapes specially produced for New York State’s 54,000 prisoners, Clear and No Screws offers a tender glimpse into life in prison through the circulation of regulated goods.

  • A Film, Reclaimed

    Produced with the support of Anna Sanders and École d’Arts Politiques (SPEAP) Paris. The ecologic crisis is a political, economic and social crisis. It is also cinematographic, as cinema coincides historically and in a critical and descriptive way with the development of the Anthropocene. A Film, Reclaimed is a conversation, an essay that reads the terrestrial crisis under the influence and with the help of the beautiful and terrible films which have accompanied it.

  • Family Daycare: Through a New Lens

    This work grew organically out of the Family Daycare Education Project, a ten-month research and outreach project based at the Cabrillo College Early Childhood Education Department in Aptos, California. The tape includes extensive footage of children in family daycare situations, modelling use of home environments and good adult/child interaction. There are scenes from neighbourhood-based classes attended by providers, including one of Spanish-speaking providers in the Flats, Santa Cruz. Throughout the tape, providers speak for themselves – outlining the issues, needs and motivation. Nancy Andreasom, experienced educator and director of the project, speaks about the importance of recognizing and responding to…

  • Spermwhore

    This short film is a queer, feminist and experimental work that began in 2009 and came to fruition in the spring of 2013. Spermwhore is a queer experimental film about unwanted childlessness in a world where normative heterosexual relationships dictate who can become parents and in what way. When it comes to reproduction our merciless bodies reduce us to merely a set sex or given gender. But the longing for children is not limited to our bodies, and the possibility of pregnancy can be gifted, shared and undertaken together.

  • Engram of Returning

    “The figure of the jig-saw / that is of picture, / the representation of a world as ours / in a complex patterning of color in light and shadows, / masses with hints of densities and distances, / cut across by a second, discrete pattern / in which we perceive on qualities of fitting and not fitting / and suggestions of rhyme / in ways of fitting and not fitting – / this jig-saw conformation of patterns / of different orders, / of a pattern of apparent reality / in which the picture we are working to bring out appears…