Film Categories: Activism + Protest

  • 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…

  • Tërra Bëstia

    Amidst a biodiverse wasteland on the brink of being enveloped by encroaching bitumen, the enigmatic Beast of the Earth materializes in a prophetic dance. Its vivid gestures, suspended between the celestial and terrestrial realms, serve as a conduit for conveying the portents of humanity’s impending fate.

  • Currents / Perpendicolare Avanti

    Currents / Perpendicolare Avanti is a camera-less, hand-made, 16mm film collage, based on the artist’s autobiographical experience as an immigrant. In three movements, the film explores the dynamics of inhabiting the in-between space of moving between multiple countries and their temporalities, through visual and sound abstraction, interlacing and recycling pre-existing film materials and, using fragments from anonymous orphan films. Utilizing these so-called scraps, Currents is a film of extensive remediation, treated by hand through the use of the emulsion lifting technique, thereby re-imagining, re-constructing, and de-constructing the liminality of immigrant life. The re-writing of the self in Currents is produced…

  • Negative / Positive Film

    Negative / Positive Film is a hand-made, camera-less collage film composed of layers of erotic 16mm films from the 1920s, 1940s, and 1970s, intermingled with nature documentaries and layers of organic materials. This visual abstraction merges together both positive black-and-white film and its negative black-and-white counterpart – on the same film base. This allows the film to exist in two versions, one positive and, the other negative. The film is an abstract remediation of female bodies dislodged from their original erotic context and ripped away from their male co-protagonists. The man is removed from the picture, while the female body…

  • Self-Portrait in Hell

    Self-Portrait in Hell is a hybrid film that combines analog and digital film manipulation techniques. Multiple layers of 8mm films and disparate fragments are amalgamated to create a self-portrait of the director. A singular self-portrait, since ironically the subject of the film is not the director but the image found in abandoned film archives, the image of another, unknown woman. The first layer is from a 1970s 8mm home movie titled Woman Dancing with Dog and was found in an antique shop. The second layer is an 8mm film belonging to an unknown archive, which the artist buried for a…

  • Touch Chinatown

    Impressions of San Francisco’s Chinatown come to life through clear tape and historical imagery.

  • AfterMath

    AfterMath describes a time when there was a wide spread belief of some grand global plan when in reality there was no plan of any kind, only competing interests constantly jockeying for a dominate position. Sequences in order of appearance: Soviet computer scientist just prior to the dissolution of the USSR – Another Soviet computer scientist just prior to the dissolution of the USSR – Semi-Trailer Truck with Trans Mountain gas line pipes resting at a Travel Center in BC – The Poplar River coal fired electrical power plant during a period of record rainfall in Saskatchewan – Abandoned car…

  • Kiri and The Girl

    Based on the experiences of Tlingit artist Kiri Geen as she reconnected and reclaimed her Indigenous heritage after her adoption, “Kiri and The Girl” follows young Kiri as she navigates losing her mother and is guided to becoming her true self.

  • Cod Story

    This is a case study of the Canadian cod fisheries collapse of 1992. It investigates what the future of natural resource management holds, and what we can learn from our past mistakes.

  • Entre la langue et l’océan

    A psycho-sexual poetic politico historico and reflective film document about the Canadian identity and the failed revolution of 1837 – 1838. To understand the disease’s origins is not equivalent to finding an effective therapy, but it is undoubtedly a crucial prerequisite. Entre la Langue et L’Océan. Surréaliste, radical, esthètiquement riche et techniquement ambitieux, ceci est un film qui résiste toute classification. A man tries to invent a liberated state and ends up in a penal colony. After awhile he hesitates to remember the cause of his incarceration. He only remembers what he left behind not what he was hoping to…