Film Categories: Abuse

  • Don’t Take My Joy Away

    In the Shatila Palestinian camp in Lebanon, two friends, Omar and Omar, find moments of joy amid hardship until sudden violence forces them to confront loss and survival.

  • Adieu Ugarit

    In 2012, Mohamad had witnessed his best friend gunned down by an armed militia on the outskirts of Damascus, Syria; the blood spilled into the lake contaminated his memory. Ten years later, the reflections on the Laurentian waters bring back Mohamad’s trauma. I asked him if he’d like to dig out the memories, to repair the pain by retreating for a few days into the most distressing calm possible for him. He tells us about death, immigration and anger. We wonder how and why we should tell this story.

  • The Years

    THE YEARS is a poetry film exploring life stages through various ages as experienced by different actors in a non-chronological order and time frame. Historical Super 8mm film footage mixes with digital recordings as the poem is voiced by the filmmaker/author. Questions of impermanence and the instability of time frame the histories indicated by the filmed images gathered by the artist over years of recorded witnessing.

  • Broca

    Using poetry, interviews with psychologists and survivors, and corporeal imagery, Broca is an experimental documentary hybrid that explores how the mind-body connection is altered after trauma. The Broca’s Area in the brain is involved primarily in speech production. During a traumatic event or when trying to recall a traumatic event, this area shuts down. This makes it harder for a survivor to talk about what’s happened. Our project offers a platform for survivors to tell their stories both verbally and non-verbally.

  • and the story remains

    After years of silence, a woman returns to a memory she was once forbidden to recall. As she develops forgotten images, the past surfaces in fragments of light, grain, and the slow emergence of a face. The film lingers between past and present, exploring whether enforced silence can wound more deeply than the trauma itself.

  • End Conversion Therapy

    A survivor of conversion therapy navigates the New York dating scene.

  • Looking For Carmen

    “In his most ravishing and heartbreaking work, Arriaga ventures again to his native Peru in search of a lost friend. Along the way he encounters the faces of those who speak about wounds that cannot heal—survivors recounting the deaths and disappearances of their beloveds during Peru’s civil war that pitted the communists of The Shining Path against the government, with both sides aligned against the people. “The dead have called us to find them,” remarks Lida Flores de Huaman, and Marcos follows her evocation, cutting memory trails into Peru that bring back the names of the disappeared. Using frames that…

  • PYOTR495

    “PYOTR495” is set one evening in present day Moscow. 16-year-old Pyotr is baited by an ultra-nationalist group known for their violent abductions and anti-gay attacks, bolstered by Russia’s LGBT propaganda law. But Pyotr has a dangerous secret his attackers could never have accounted for.

  • Luna e Santur

    “Originally commissioned as a short for Ben Coonley’s My First 3D Part 2 at Microscope Gallery, I expanded this project into what it currently is: hooded figures, violent passion, and stroboscopic tenderness brought on by a paranormal encounter I had in the summer of 2015.” –JGS ‘‘A visually assaultive threnody for losses never fully revealed and composed for monstrous times, LUNA E SANTUR mingles sex and death with the supernatural and subnaturalistic.’-Colin Beckett “Moon and sun are elliptically and stroboscopically conjured in Joshua Gen Solondz’s cloistered yet operatic Luna e Santur. In milky, hand-processed images, hooded figures recalling Magritte’s The Lovers enact a…

  • A Celebration of Darkness

    A woman with a tortured past is triggered to take an unexpected walk down memory lane, she finds herself face-to- face with her inner child. Giving her a chance to make peace with her past. Does she find a way to celebrate darkness or does she become engulfed forever by it? In 2015, Jaene turned 40. This lead her to become introspective about her unusual life history. From a childhood of severe abuse, neglect, psychiatric institutionalization and being in care, she grew to become a street involved sex worker by 20. She met Elder, Isaac Day from Serpent River First…