Film Categories: Activism + Protest

  • Le Dormeur Du Val

    Art essay video, free interpretation of Arthur Rimbaud’s poem “Le Dormeur Du Val”, aimed at pointing the absurdity of war: through history and continents, no matter their race or religion, soldiers, instruments of the authorities, represent one and only person: another victim.

  • War Movie

    Two close friends leave a movie theatre after having seen a war movie. One is set off by it, and the other is ambivalent. This seemingly innocuous disagreement spirals into a larger point of contention between the two, unearthing deeper truths.

  • Rettet das Feuer (Rescue The Fire)

    Berlin, 1993. Photographer and artist, Jürgen Baldiga, battles HIV. In the 1990s, the AIDS epidemic reached its climax, to which no one was prepared. Infected bodies and their stories diminish, erasing their existence. Through the death of his friends and subsequently his own, Baldiga becomes the chronicler of his time: “I am taking a picture. I photograph the world. I exist.” Identity and history disappear without the persistence of memory. Until the final days of his life, Jürgen documents the exodus that seizes him. Rettet das Feuer (Rescue the Fire) directs the gaze to a piece of West Berlin history…

  • Doing and undoing: poems from within #1 radiotherapy

    It deals with interventions that I had made with my mother during her cancer treatment. The film is part of large project dealing with my mother’s cancer healing process. Hacer y Deshacer: Poems from Within (2019) is an interactive video installation. Most of the video sequences show Gelis’s mother undressing, one strand of yarn at a time, sometimes in Panama’s Casco Viejo (historic district), sometimes in the turbulent waters of the Pacific. Using her mother’s body, she tells the story of a cancer survivor, the story of countless others. Gelis invites us into the healing process: the viewer can change…

  • The Island

    A garden between Oakland and Berkley where its inhabitants, marginalized by gentrification, plant fruit trees and flowers to pay homage to their loved ones who died in battles against poverty. This is a space of love and freedom cared by Brian for the last 25 years. The island resists, as a living legacy of the Black Panthers who were the first to organize the neighbourhood.

  • Quimsacocha

    For the downstream communities of the high mountains of Quimsacocha, water is sacred. So when the giant Canadian company set their eyes to mine their land for gold and copper, 30-year-old Bolivar and 73-year-old Isaura were not happy. Isaura and Bolivar rely on water for their livelihood. Isaura owns four cows and Bolivar is in charge of the community’s water system. For them, water is life, and mining will jeopardize the future of their communities. Quimsacocha takes an honest look at these indigenous communities, their cultural traditions, and their lives in this picturesque landscape of the Western Andes Mountains in…

  • Vanilla

    Vanilla takes you through the everyday ordinary life of a disabled senior citizen living in Ottawa, Canada. It is a portrait documenting aging and the loneliness of those suffering in silence. The black and white film was shot on 16mm Bolex film camera using a KODAK 7222 Double-X Negative film. Processed by Niagara Film Lab (Toronto). Created as part of Independent Filmmakers Co-operative of Ottawa (IFCO) – Dogme Production Challenge.

  • The Ritual of the Sex Magick Warriors

    The Sex Magick Warriors are organizing, they reveal themselves to the city and risk it all to carry out an obscure objective. The colors pink and teal are the embodiment of Magick, Art and Sexuality and their use by the warriors -through empathy, telepathy and tactile care- spills the tea on their means for survival in these harsh urban environments. The ritual exposes the hardships of this army of lovers and reveals their sensual strategy for self preservation.

  • The Shouting Flower

    A work about collaboration and process, “The Shouting Flower” approaches political resistance from multiple subject positions–plant, child, filmmaker–in an attempt to model what Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing calls “work across difference.” Using images processed in plant material that was gathered at key locations throughout the city, as well as direct animation and audio recorded on a child’s toy, the film documents its own creation within a landscape of hostility and neglect. A collaboration against cooperation, it becomes as it refuses. Refusing, dispersing, it shouts, “No!”

  • The Dandelion Club

    A gang of queer kids stylishly loiter about town. Pollinating. A collective resistance that collects at the margins of society and develops even on its fringes. No patch of concrete too solid to bloom through. An existence as a pest. A nuisance. And a fabulous one at that. Negotiating identity as: weed or flower?