Genres: experimental

  • Close your eyes, eyes, eyes

    That you see with closed eyes may be visible or invisible. Distinguish between possibilities and cognitions. Occasionally an object and at times, an event. May be future or a place, eyes/snow, wind, or sometimes time and aspiration, sweat and periodically desire, or the remains of those. Distinguish the difference between enabling and cognition.

  • MRI fiction journey

    During MRI scanning, I would fall into a profound deception, and in this unpredictable space, all alone and completely disconnected from the outside world, I would travel the universe and ponder about incidents that I would never be able to experience. Incomprehensible yet significant senses and experience that I accidentally faced one day. And the goosebumps from the realness of those moments is weighing down on me. Based on such experience, I visualized my fictious stories along with those of others.

  • Cinabrethe

    I have a strangely comfortable feeling in the porch, being neither outside nor inside. Since then, the porch has a role for me above the space. My porch, existing as an ambiguous size, occupies the role between outside and inside. neither cold nor warm, neither dangerous nor safe, neither noisy nor quiet. Why do I feel safe in this indeterminate space? I recapitulate the insignificant events in my everyday life, I am on the trail of the past and the already disappeared.

  • Why is water so heavy? vol i. time never changed water

    In part of an ongoing autobiographical-fictional collection entitled “Why is water so heavy?” (c. 2022-present), interlocking the fluidity and borderless nature of water in relation to diaspora and landmarking. I dwell on self-ambiguity as time continues to spatialize fragments of my ancestral histories and cultural practices lost in water.

  • Memory Rituals [Part One]: Memory of Trees

    Memory Rituals [Part One]: Memory of Trees three-screen video, 5.44 minutes, made with support from Media City Film Festival’s Chrysalis Fellowship 2023. Thinking about remembering, about forgetting, and about the memory of trees. [more info: https://cbattle.com/memory-rituals-part-one-memory-of-trees/]

  • Toronto, Old and New

    Allegedly “bursting at the seams” for over a century now, Toronto is cacophonous, cosmopolitan, and often confusing. A landscape shaped by generations of dreams and desires, the metropolis bears the overlapping imprints of capitalism, colonialism, conflict, community and celebration. Juxtaposing found footage, paper ephemera, and newly shot 16mm material, “Toronto, Old and New” explores the relationship between past and present in Canada’s largest city.

  • Łódź:22592

    A recently published book by Toronto’s Art Gallery of Ontario, profiling the resurrected photographs made clandestinely by Henryk Ross ( 1910-1991) in Poland’s Lodz ghetto, inspires the filmmaker to wonder once again, how his father survived those turbulent, WW II years in Poland. Filmed in the USA, Canada and Poland. Sound begins at 8:02

  • 24 Cards

    A tribute to film critic, writer, visual artist and filmmaker, Donald Richie who from the early 1980’s until 2013 was a friend and mentor. In his writing and curating, Donald Richie was instrumental in introducing Japanese Cinema to Western audiences. These yearly post cards, hand written or typed with unique personal images were one form of communication between the filmmaker and Mr. Richie. The film is SILENT.

  • Handtinting

    “‘Handtinting’ is the apt title of a film made from outtakes from a Job Corps documentary which features hand-tinted sections. The film is full of small movements and actions, gestures begun and never completed. Repeated images, sometimes in colour, sometimes not. A beautifully realized type of chamber-music film whose sum-total feeling is ritualistic.” – Robert Cowan, Take One

  • meditations on a process

    An experimental documentary exploring the filmmakers’ mutual interests in spirituality, imprints of childhood, and ecologies of presence in personal filmmaking practices, bookended by poetry that situates their musings in a rapidly changing Toronto.