Film Categories: Abstraction
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L’Arrière-Pays
An autobiographical fable at the cross-section between SCI-FI and Memory Film. The film explores the journey of two dreamers trapped between Past and Present, between Dream and Reality. It combines excerpts from an immigration journal, found text and images suspended in a dystopian dark space.
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Fluid Bound
An experimental gender fluid, mestize-Indigenous film that uses text, sound design, crude animation, and bondage rope to meditate on the complex, generations-old relationships and battles between our skin and our souls.
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Into the Wild
A glimpse through the cracks, somebody is walking in the meadow, trees and flowers trembling in the wind. A world that only film can see, a material flow emerging from the coupling of camera, celluloid, silver salts, chemicals, light particles and the hand of the filmmaker. The film was entirely processed by hand and chemically treated: overexposed images were brought back to life with bleach, other images were solarized and reversed.
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K-SARAM I: Tale of the pig head
Centered around the Koryo-saram community in Rostov-on-Don, Russia, the film displays a shamanistic memorial ancestral ritual „Jesa”, encompassing the collective memory of Korean diaspora, the wish of the Koryo-saram for a unification of South and North Korea, and showing the real appearance of the ghosts of migrants whose transformation to spirits was not succeeded. “Saram” means human in Korean. The title refers to the today very popular K-export- products like K-Drama, K-Pop, K-Beauty, etc. and to the name that the Soviet-Korean diaspora uses instead of the South-Korean term “Koryo-In”. Approximately 500,000 ethnic Koreans reside in the former Soviet Union. Most…
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Petal to the Metal
This hand-processed 16mm film reflects on botanical animism. It is a song written for night-crawlers, compost, and shadows, inspired by human flower-lust. Water, fire, earth and air are interwoven with the garden’s creature crew. The work draws a parallel between the photographic alchemy of cinematic experiments and the photosynthetic processes of plants. Honourable mention, Top Canadian Short Jury Award, GIRAF 17 (2021).
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PSYCHE
A meditating man contends with the forces of his mind.
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Contents under Pressure
An anxious young party-goer finds love at a party, but after committing a party faux pas, is destroyed in a washing machine accident. From here, the project pivots, self-conscious and needing to recast its hero, who quickly has an existential crisis (“what’s my motivation?”). A poetic, quirky, singular meditation on identity and personal history, populated with the beautiful vistas of Atlantic Canada.
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Red Tunnel (紅色隧道)
To celebrate Grandma Wu’s birthday, the villagers assembled plastic tarps around the village—a canopy that resembled a red tunnel. Weaving inside and outside of the canopy, a secret mechanism of domination may be glimpsed. Entrapped under a makeshift space, the villagers waver between laughter and labour as poetics intermittently exceed the banality of life.
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Spark
When the universe began it erupted into a vast array of fundamental particles such as neutrons, electrons and protons. These particles decayed or combined over time to create everything that our senses perceive today while framing all the we desire and feel. Spark definition: An abrupt electrical discharge that occurs when a sufficiently high electric field creates an ionized, electrically conductive channel. Image description: Silhouette of a person’s head against a field of green with sparks of white. Their hair is haloed by the light.
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Evidence of Wind
The filmmaker impulsively starts capturing the image and sound of wind. He realizes the only way to capture the wind is to show, instead, trees in motion. The limitation becomes the motif for philosophical contemplation of how we understand the nature of truth that can be learned from something else than the truth itself. The assemblage of the meditative narration, electronic music and the images of swaying trees, leads the journey through a paradoxical, yet thought-provoking experience. The enduring time reveals the moments of reflecting on our belief in the world in a time of uncertainty.
