Language: English
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Thorn on her side
A human narrates the story of a bad dream after buying a gorgeous plant at the market. What starts as an innocent encounter to relieve loneliness from isolation becomes a nightmarish seduction scene between a plant and its human. Together they give birth to a new creature.
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WE DON’T TALK LIKE WE USED TO
“Shot between Hong Kong, Japan, and the US, this short is Joshua Gen Solondz’s most ambitious work to date, a portrait of the home and the world that is dense, textured, creepy, anxious, noisy, silly, and confounding, but always tender.”-TIFF “We Don’t Talk Like We Used To” continues Joshua Gen Solondz’s loose series of addled diary films with a film that is part travelogue, part affective almanac, and part cinematic noise show. With stops in Hong Kong, New Hampshire, Japan, and Brooklyn, the film alloys obscured faces, oozing on-screen text, throbbing abstractions, solarized superimpositions, and the occasional dad joke into…
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Blood on The Square: Surviving Rabaa
Blood on The Square: Surviving Rabaa is a documentary about the Rabaa massacre in Egypt, described by Human Rights Watch as “one of the world’s largest killings of demonstrators in a single day in recent history.” Canadian-Egyptian filmmaker, Mohamed Dawood, who witnessed and survived the military-led massacre embarks on a journey of healing by seeking out other survivors who were present in Rabaa on that fateful day.
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Crushed Between Ocean and Sky
An unexpected event on a tall ship headed for Antarctica incites passengers to reflect on life, death, adventure and irony against the vast ocean backdrop. Crushed Between Ocean and Sky speaks to the transcendence of exploring new places, the power of nature and life’s brutal tendency to catch us off guard.
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Feet in Water, Head on Fire
Along the San Andreas fault line in Southern California, Indigenous palm trees and date palms imported from West Asia flourish. The people who tend to them reflect a landscape of frictions and affections shaped over generations by agriculture, luxury real estate, and border politics. Like the infinity storytelling of The 1001 Nights, stories fold into dreams and back into stories, a constellation of voices settle over mountains and into the earth. Intertwining color 16mm with textural black and white film hand processed with the dates leftover from harvest and plants native to the valley Feet in Water, Head on Fire…
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Positive Transparencies
‘Positive Transparencies’ captures the tensions arising from the destruction and reconstruction of 17 individual 35mm analog slides. Using Hornby Island as its focal point, the film explores the methods of observing, transforming, and transmuting the natural world through technology. Employing analog deconstruction, the project repurposes the island’s landscapes, creating dynamic motion sequences that emulate a process of artistic disintegration.
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Pieces Within
A poets’ muse calls on his inner child to save their relationship.
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As Grey Falls
4k, colour, 22′ What touches us when we are amongst wild animals like the birds of the Fraser River Delta in British Columbia? They do not touch us physically. They seem, at best indifferent to our presence; perhaps they are annoyed. Do they even look at us when their gaze seems turned our way? We cannot know. Nonetheless we love these creatures, and hope that they will persist. “As Grey Falls” wanders delicately in the places these birds call home, wondering where a human’s place is in their worlds. “As Grey Falls” is a film of current urgency, now that…
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Scenes from ‘Deseret’
2-Channel video installation (2x4k, colour) Festival premiere: Ann Arbor Film Festival Designed as a 2-channel video installation for projection at large scale. Both channels are combined here in one widescreen image for streaming purposes. When watching on a computer, headphones are recommended for proper sound reproduction. “Scenes from Deseret” was initially inspired by two sources: the ever-changing landscape of the state of Utah in the US, and James Benning’s film about the state, “Deseret” (1995). The history of Utah recounted in Benning’s film ended in 1992. A lot has happened since that time, and I wanted to capture some of…
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The Evening News
At first glance The Evening News is a straightforward nature film about what some animals get up to in the evening in a remote valley in southwestern Montana. Upon closer watching and listening, the film reveals complex and changing relationships between image and sound, and between language and our senses, that prod us to rethink our relationship to the earth and the creatures with whom we share it as a home. With its surprise ending, The Evening News challenges those habits of mind and perception that keep us from perceiving, and loving, the natural world—and cinema—for what it is. 100…
