Film Categories: Animals

  • P L U M E

    Fingers pluck fallen evidence of flight; placed and traced to make avian light.

  • Saving Gorillas. One Sip At A Time

    Uganda is home to the critically endangered mountain gorillas surrounded by people near their protected habitat who are also struggling to survive. Doctor Gladys Kalema – Zikusoka realized that the farmers were not being given a fair price for their coffee, which led them to use the national park to meet their basic family needs for food and fuelwood. Thinking about new opportunities for the African Community as well as saving the gorillas from diseases and poaching, she founded a social enterprise so humans and gorillas could coexist.

  • Exercises for Being Close to You: A Story for the Arctic Refuge

    Exercises for Being Close to You is an experimental documentary that follows a group of hikers through Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The team is in search of the Porcupine Caribou herd in hopes of collecting stories that could help push back on oil exploration and drilling on the caribou’s birthing grounds. The narrator, admitting to a perverse desire to be close to everything, wants nothing more than to spoon a caribou. As the film culminates in anticipation of the “money shot”, the audience is pushed to evaluate its expectations of nature films. Meanwhile, the expedition team is left to…

  • Transit – Destination

    Cities are where people tend to nest. This is where we can engage in the greatest range of pursuits while being provided a reasonable likelihood of day to day sustenance. While not apparent for the most part, cities require far flung resources making them islands or something akin to a space station. Cities are also de facto barriers for many other animal species, especially those that require migration routes to survive. Note: The voices are Kent Tate and a friendly passerby engaging in a conversation about birds while he was filming some office towers.

  • Heavy Petting

    A lonely young woman scrambling to fill the void left by a missing household pet forges a strange and tenuous bond with an unexpected visitor role-playing in a cat costume. When the animal returns, the visitor is discarded and returns to life of profound solitude and invisibility, which inspires a macabre test of their social obscurity.

  • Island Cowboy

    Island Cowboy is a documentary that follows a Canadian beekeeper on Prince Edward Island during one of his last years of work. At the age of 68, Stan Sandler would like to retire, but impending threats to his island home’s ecosystem threaten the future of the bees, and the health of the environment. The relationship between a beekeeper’s labour and the economy of the island’s blueberry crop is explored through a season of beekeeping, as we get an intimate look at Stan and the “bee cowboys”.

  • The Names of Things

    A bed-bound woman’s year passes as a day: her time is no longer measured by the increments of a clock but by the quality of weather outside her window. Objects emerge and merge in the gloom; the old woman dissolves and reforms. Her muteness, her glaucomas and her inactivity render things indeterminate. By naming objects, animal and phenomena we reduce and delineate them, and so separate ourselves from the world around us. Shot at ISO 409,000 the image is granulated by pixelation and noise and any discreteness an object or thing might possess is confused by the digital processes of…

  • Cohabitat

    An absurdist take on the concept of rewilding, Cohabitat imagines the home as host to a growing number of organisms gradually redefining our environment, whether we’re aware of it or not.

  • Tarpaulins

    The point of departure for “Tarpaulins” was a colorful disturbance on the cityscape of Los Angeles: a home in the distance festooned with a giant striped tarp. These are termite fumigation tents and filmmaker Lisa Truttmann follows their story on a two-year long investigation as she hunts down the tents, the homes, the termites inside and their traces. As the film goes on, the termites soon become our allies, guiding us through Los Angeles’ neighborhoods on their own terms. Questions of life and death, profit and loss, home and un-home, macrocosm and microcosm are brought to the fore in pursuit…

  • A Semiotic Square for Violent Bear

    What does our culture dream? How can we locate that dream within the logics which govern our lives? Half collage, half essay, half serious, “A Semiotic Square for Violent Bear” is a busy, referential riff on the political moment.