Film Categories: Abstraction

  • Letters From Vancouver

    Letters from Vancouver (1973) comprise two films, made at the same time, that share a common interest in “the medium is the message” (McLuhan), and form a reflexive, self-referential enquiry into the film medium itself. Together, “the politics of perception” (33min)and “the framing of perception” (33min) form a meditation on our audio/visual creation, bearer of information and culture, meaning and representation. It is a medium with extraordinary powers, able to evoke the deepest feelings of love and loss, anger and fear, laughter and thoughtfulness, yet of great fragility, fading with time, precarious on a perforated strip of celluloid.

  • What’s Ours and What We Are

    In “What’s Ours and What We Are,” images, motifs and words that originally served a particular political agenda are playfully manipulated to distort and re-contextualize their original status, satirically articulating the purpose of propaganda which is to ‘speak to’ and ultimately to persuade a spectator.

  • Hear Me

    A formal collage of various song bites that expresses feelings of anxiety and depression. Uses music and lyrics to describe struggles with mental health / finding hope. I collected lyrics for a couple months that I connected with and helped me understand and describe my struggles with mental health. Then I stitched them together in a poem of sorts. The poem as well as the imagery are jumpy and mimic what goes on in a spiral or panic attack (at least for me) as I move through a dark space and back toward light.

  • Pariah, my brother, I follow you show me the route to the springs

    The holiday season is fast approaching in Tijuana, Mexico where Saül and his father-in-law, Mathieu are getting ready for a busy day at the street market selling recycled tennis shoes. In the darkness of Dawn, the deserted road to the Market swells up with memories of their migration journey. After a long trek from Haiti, Brazil and nine other South and Central-American countries, they have been here two years, waiting for a chance to claim asylum in the US. We too shall wait for the sunrise, haunted by the words of Davertige, he too, a passer-by on The Route to…

  • Views From Home: Facing North

    Views From Home: Facing North is a short video first shown as part of Edie Steiner’s lens-based exhibition at Gallery 44 Members Space in 2014. The project explores the changing view from her home on the Toronto waterfront from 2004 to late 2019 and is a record of rapid urban development over multiple seasons. The work began as an analogue photographic project on medium format film and later transformed into video recordings, gradually changing from analogue to digital processes over the years of the recordings. Central to the frame is the site of Fort York, which gradually disappears from view…

  • Activate NDN Consciousness

    Activate NDN Consciousness combines found footage of harmful Indigenous portrayals with contemporary NDN protest and revolt.

  • What Happens to a Dream Deferred

    It’s New Year’s Eve in Tijuana, Mexico. Wood and Colonel are busy making Soup Joumou to celebrate Haitian Independence Day with their friends at the “Trap House”. As their cooking progresses, memories of the perilous journey that brought them to the US/Mexico border two years ago resurface. From Haiti to Brasil and through nine other South and Central-American countries, here they are, sandwiched between their dream of a musical career in the US and a US president who calls Haiti a shit hole and believes all Haitians have AIDS.

  • Sammy

    Toronto, July 27, 2013, shortly after midnight. Sammy Yatim is standing inside an empty streetcar, a small knife in his right hand. A Toronto Police officer will shoot him dead. From a mixture of gunpowder, blood and acrimony: the portrait of a boy who didn’t have to die.

  • Before After Again

    In a series of reflections and reversals, this dual-projector film follows the flow of carbon from mountains to sea, as it is transformed from forest ecosystem into industrial landscape, and back again. Commissioned for the End of the World project by Iris Film Collective and funded by the Canada Arts Council. Although its interpretation was left entirely to us, the project title made reference to the West Coast as the edge or end of Canada; to global concerns over the compromised and fragile state of the planet; and to the often predicted “end of film”. To link the final films…

  • Night Visions

    Night Visions developed as a conversation about psychic energy, sleep cycles and synaesthesia. The result is a haunting spell of colour and rhythm.