Film Categories: Activism + Protest

  • Like A Canon

    Li’l bunny moves past her fear of losing her home and into action and recruitment. A commissioned work for the ECHO PARK FILM CENTER in celebration of their 14th year of operation. Created and presented in part with hand-processed Black & White super 8 film.

  • Private View

    A view out my window and worries in my head. — A PRIVATE VIEW is a site-specific collective screening series curated by John Woods and created as a part of Iris Film Collective’s IN HOUSE series. What is private space and what is public? In the subdivided landscape of Vancouver privacy can be evasive, but each of us views our home as our castle and our homes’ windows give us a unique vantage point that is ours and ours alone. Iris member John Woods gave a roll of expired colour film stock to each of the members of the collective…

  • Which Way Is East

    “A frog that sits at the bottom of a well thinks that the whole sky is only as big as the lid of a pot.” When two American sisters travel north from Ho Chi Minh City to Hanoi, conversations with Vietnamese strangers and friends reveal to them the flip side of a shared history. Lynne and Dana Sachs’ travel diary of their trip to Vietnam is a collection of tourism, city life, culture clash, and historic inquiry that’s put together with the warmth of a quilt. “Which Way Is East” starts as a road trip and flowers into a political…

  • Investigation of a Flame

    On May 17, 1968 nine Vietnam War protesters, including a nurse, an artist and three priests, walked into a Catonsville, Maryland draft board office, grabbed hundreds of selective service records and burned them with homemade napalm. “Investigation of a Flame” is an intimate, experimental documentary portrait of the Catonsville Nine, this disparate band of resisters who chose to break the law in a defiant, poetic act of civil disobedience. A series of informal, yet charged conversations with members of the group encourages viewers to ask their own questions about the relevance of such events today. How did the photos, trial…

  • States of UnBelonging

    The core of this haunting meditation on war, land, the Bible, and filmmaking is a portrait of Revital Ohayon, an Israeli filmmaker and mother killed near the West Bank. Director Lynne Sachs creates a film on the violence of the Middle East by exchanging letters with an Israeli friend. Together, they reveal Revital’s story through her films, news reports, and interviews, culminating in heartbreaking footage of children discussing the violence they’ve witnessed. Without taking sides or casting blame, the film becomes a cine-essay on fear and filmmaking, tragedy and transformation, violence and the land of Israel/Palestine. RECENT NEWS! Oxford University…

  • And Then We Marched

    Filmmaker Lynne Sachs shoots Super 8mm film of the Jan. 21 Women’s March in Washington, D.C. and intercuts this recent footage with archival material of early 20th Century Suffragists marching for the right to vote, 1960s antiwar activists and 1970s advocates for the Equal Rights Amendment. Sachs then talks about the experience of marching with her seven-year old neighbor who offers disarmingly insightful observations on the meaning of their shared actions. Screenings: Other Cinema, San Francisco; Workers Unite Film Festival, 2019 KOSMA Gwangju International organized by the Korean Society of Media & Arts

  • The Way We Are

    “The Way We Are” shares excerpts of stories from audio interviews with 4 queer Asian women living in Toronto: Katherine Chun, Wenda Li, Tamai Kobayashi, and Nancy Seto. Told in the present-tense, these stories are arranged in a way that explores the past as the present, and in doing so, immersing viewers into the real-lived experiences from a different generation. This film was inspired by the intimacy of looking through a photo album with loved ones; there is something nostalgic about the materiality of handling photographs, especially in this digital era where images are so increasingly ubiquitous. The act of…

  • 7FF on¢idia

    In ancient China the skin of the tiger was the representation of “continuous changing”; in Mayan world through the path of Bolom Chon (Jaguar) they could read constellations: the dance of cosmos. Fluxes are grouped in the film; spotted-jaguar, “7 pancadas”, speckled plants, ounce (oz), “golden spider”. Matter-energy-information varies. Side by side communication, surplus value of code. Commodities, bit coins, mountains of data. 7FF on¢idia: real impossibilia of capital life.

  • From Tanzania, With Love

    After appearing in a remake of the Macklemore & Ryan Lewis hit single “Same Love”, Dayon Monson is forced to flee her home in Tanzania. Facing extreme persecution for identifying as trans and promoting LGBTQ human rights, Dayon connects with Rainbow Railroad in hopes of seeking asylum in Canada. This is her story.

  • I’m a fag 4 U

    Inspired by the cinematography of “Truth or Dare” and “Paris is Burning,” this video is an homage to late 80s/early 90s gay culture and aesthetic. Shot in 16mm, it features co-director Vivek Shraya and two other queer dancers (Rodney Diverlus and Phil Villeneuve) reclaiming streets and sidewalks, common sites of homophobic violence, and the word “fag.” Also a creative response to the loss of queer spaces during the pandemic, we hope that this video will remind queer viewers that they aren’t alone, even when we can only connect virtually, and that our queerness–and faggotry–is beautiful and alive. Image description: A…