Genres: experimental
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Bubba
BUBBA shows the portrait of an old man (the filmmaker’s grandfather), altered in several, increasingly abstracting ways. The first way the man is shown is through composite imaging, and the use of masks while shooting 16mm on a Bolex camera, achieving surreal, distorted, cubist-like impressions of the face. The second effect was achieved by sandwiching the negative print and positive print of the original portraits and printing them using a Model J printer. The third, and final effect was generated by hand processing the negative/positive hybrid, alongside negatives from a previous film. The concluding effect is a feeling of the…
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America
An Iranian journalist couple wants to move to America to escape the difficulties of their country. The woman receives her visa but her husband doesn’t. He stays in Iran and watches his wife find success on television and falls into a state of depression.
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Father Knows Father Best
Utilizing damaged film loops and photograms, “Father Knows Father Best” plays off an old found-footage print of the American situation comedy to highlight a dysfunctional family paradigm. Malcolm Goldstein’s experimental violin soundings exploit the atonal dialogue.
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everyday star
Everyday states of being and decay are observed through the infinite scope of the cosmos and the restorative light which emanates from it, driving cinematic and photographic impulses.
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Bruce Eves In Polari
BRUCE EVES IN POLARI is an intimate, upclose and personal portrait of Bruce Eves, the 2018 winner of Canada’s Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts – that country’s highest honour. Eves’ work has remarkable intrinsic value that also engages key aspects of culture and history. His story began in Toronto’s clique-riven avant-garde art scene in the mid-1970s. As practicing artist and Programming Director for CEAC (Centre for Experimental Art and Communication), among other activities Eves crafted socially-engaged performance art pieces that were shown in Canada, throughout Western and Eastern Europe, as well as the United States. This included…
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Alia
Haunted by the memory of civil war, an old Lebanese man revisits the last few moments of a fateful bus ride that leads up to the murder of his beloved.
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Deema
After years of living abroad, Deema is reunited with her childhood friend Nidal. When their love blossoms like the Arab Spring, a pain nested deep within suddenly re-surfaces as she fights to revive the phoenix inside of her.
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Slumberparty 2018
Slumberparty 2018 is a remake of a 1984 Super 8 film called Slumberparty made by the Positive Pornographers, a mostly queer collective of Toronto-based artists, activists and sex-workers. Commissioned by A-Space Gallery’s “Developing a Women’s Erotic Language on Film” workshop, Slumberparty was made as a direct intervention in Toronto’s feminist porn debates. They wrote, “we didn’t set out to make a work of art. We set out to make something that might turn us on. Join us for what one previewer called “Mary Poppins’ first lesbian orgy. Slumberparty screened twice in public in 1984 then disappeared until 2016, when the…
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‘On The Road’ by Jack Kerouac
If Jack Kerouac wrote his legendary novel On the Road on a long paper scroll, why not do it on a long 35mm film roll as well? By re-typing the complete book –with the use of 35mm black leader instead of paper on a typewriter– this project attempts, among other things, to convert Kerouac’s romantic rhythmic writing method onto a cold and mechanical transcription in order to give the work new possibilities and readings that, when projected at 24 frames a second, although they do emphasize Kerouac’s intentions of immediacy, they transform the text into illegible blotches of letters that…
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Emergence
“Emergence” is a video installation created to counter the violence of blackface in its representation of Blackness. This piece re-asserts the beauty of Blackness and challenges the reductive nature of contemporary Canadian blackface through extreme close-ups of black faces in all their diversity. Shot in extreme slow motion and projected by two projectors at a large scale on two screens, the images appear to be stills at first, but reveal themselves over time to be moving. These parts of lips, noses, eyes, posit the face as a signifying landscape. Serene images contrast with others that depict faces and arms pressed…
