Genres: experimental

  • Saskatchewan

    Using home movies, vintage memorabilia, and the straight facts about Saskatchewan, the filmmaker creates an eccentric portrait of the first year of his life, and the province that shaped his identity. “Brian Stockton’s bittersweet tribute to the province he was born in perfectly captures the essence of life in the vast and lonely prairies.” – Nicole Cohen, EYE Weekly “Miss at your peril… Stockton’s grounded, deadpan voice-over, combined with the homely seduction of the images, keeps the tether strong between private myth and real life.” – Cameron Bailey, Now Magazine

  • Caress

    April light, naked silvery branches, craggy bark, towering in a blue sky. How do you embrace a tree that has given you four years of pleasure? Two weeks before I moved away, I filmed its portrait with my camera, bending its light in passionate strokes.

  • Shadowy Encounters

    “An extraordinarily provocative film which draws the viewer in with its strange mesmerizing beauty.” – Brothers Quay The film “Shadowy Encounters” is an homage to the work of the Quay Brothers. The film is a synthesis of collaged moving and still images taken directly from the Quay Brothers’ 35mm films and recontextualized in order to metaphorically and responsively capture and reframe the Quay’s films’ qualities. The resultant richly textured and layered imagery delves the labyrinthine and secret realms of the Quay Brothers’ world. In itself, “Shadowy Encounters” is a complete, compelling, mythic and painstaking transcription of an inner journey. It…

  • Rub

    Masturbation is one of life’s sweetest distractions. This experimental film is an homage to the pleasures a girl can experience, all on her own.

  • Poppa (Toxic 2)

    “Poppa” is about the contradictions of fatherhood. On one hand, a man craves the control and predictability of mathematics. This part of the “job” is presented in the form of layered nursery rhymes, sung in numbers. On the other hand, control will always elude those who seek it. When control is lost, the joy of surprise, the essence of fatherhood, can be found. This is demonstrated in “Poppa” through the image, made up of film of my son William when he was 10 months old. The film is processed by hand in a plastic bucket and then chemically tinted and…

  • Final (Toxic 6)

    “Final” is a nihilistic glimpse of a future where our time has finally run out. Civilization is in ruins as storms explode over half-demolished buildings. The clock accelerates in anticipation of our encroaching successor.

  • Cameras Take Five

    The enduring romance of lines is explored in this colourful handmade cameraless animation by Montreal animator Steven Woloshen. Dave Brubeck’s classic jazz standard “Take Five” is the starting point of this abstract visual interpretation. In Cinemascope. “I began this film in my usual fashion, which is to say, I hadn’t planned any narratives, characters or sections as starting points for this animation. As I worked and listened to the track – at least twenty times – the line drawing (representing the sound of a saxophone) was leading me either to one side of the frame or the other. The main…

  • Broken Dreams

    “Broken Dreams” is a beautifully filmed, evocative look into and out of the world of depression. Filmed in Super 8 and 16mm with a hand-wind Bolex camera, it captures the essence of darkness and light, hope and despair. Experimental images take us through a series of landscapes including the bleak moon-like setting of White’s Pass in Alaska, the unendingly high office towers of New York City, the eerie facade of the Carlton Hotel all alight for the Cannes Film Festival and then fall beneath the surface of the ocean to the depths of another world filled with undulating sea grass,…

  • Cooper/Bridges Fight

    The anxieties and frustrations of McCarthy-era Hollywood are integrated into this reconstruction of an infamous scene from “High Noon.” The struggle between a sheriff and his deputy become one with the film’s emulsion. Considered “un-American” by the House of Un-American Activities Committee, High Noon’s writer and director was blacklisted in the 1950s for alleged Communist sympathies. “They punish each other mercilessly, nothing barred. The horses, becoming nervous, rear and whine in their stalls…”- from “High Noon,” original script by Carl Foreman.

  • Oil Wells: Sturgeon Road & 97th Street

    Highlighting the repetitive nature of oil wells in northern Alberta, this film documents a sighting common to the Canadian prairies.