Film Categories: Anthropology

  • L’Arrière-Pays

    An autobiographical fable at the cross-section between SCI-FI and Memory Film. The film explores the journey of two dreamers trapped between Past and Present, between Dream and Reality. It combines excerpts from an immigration journal, found text and images suspended in a dystopian dark space.

  • Akedellic

    An unfinished experimental film about the horrors of war. sound will be added.

  • Engine Complex: Bridge/Seed

    A fraught passage of the camera’s eye through fantastical architectural and psychological spaces. Somewhere between a body and a building, the lens tumbles and lurches through time and space, caught between observation and escape. Themes of construction blend with surgical examination while the joys and pains of discovery rattle with a search-and-rescue-like urgency. Where are we? Co-directed by Bryan Morello and Matthew Endler, this work emerges from a multi-level structure (called the Engine Complex) built in their shared studio. It is a playground for collaborative overlap and hosts a wide spectrum of playful set design and experimental performance activities.

  • Pinhole Park

    “Pinhole Park” was created using a 35mm film tin modified into an outward-looking 59-pinhole camera that registers images on a single film loop mounted in the tin. Each loop is exposed in one moment with 59 pinhole “lenses” to create as many distinct images that, when presented in series, create a panning of the landscape in various directions. The work was exposed on outdated black-and-white 35mm print stock acquired from Archives Canada discards, and processed by hand in Caffenol chemistry, a less environmentally impactful developer made with coffee, vitamin C, and washing soda. The film and photographs document a city…

  • Of Beauty & Deities: Music and Dance of India

    Focused on southern Indian classical bharatanatyam dance and music, this hour-long documentary consists mostly of performance and interviews. The performers come from a group called Kalanjali: Dances of India that maintains performers in Chennai, India, and a dance academy in Berkeley, CA, USA. Our documentary was filmed in the San Francisco Bay Area. The group performers come from the dance academy and are mostly young women from the Indian diaspora. The solo dancer, K.P. Yeshoda, as well as the musicians, come from India but traveled to California to join us in the studio. Kalanjali’s directors are the primary interview subjects:…

  • The world is blue at its edges

    “What could I tell you about the world I live in?” Addressing her unborn child, the narrator tries to find answers partly through claustrophobic pictures interwoven with intimate notes on a pregnancy in times of a pandemic. Based on a childhood memory, this experimental short film spans from the Cold War Iron Curtain, to the so-called “refugee crisis,” and the renewed closing of borders during COVID-19. Textures of walls closing in blur with pixelated maps, creating a subjective portrait of a new reality and its digital image-world. // “Iris Blauensteiner’s and Christine Moderbacher’s ‘The world is blue at its edges’…

  • Upwards Tide

    A magical lunar reverie filmed over four years on the days and nights of the full moon, this shimmering moving-image poem fluidly combines images of the saltwater Loch Carron in the Scottish Highlands and leafy Viennese forests. The two locations blur and bleed into each other, just as the film itself (shot on gloriously outdated analogue stock) wanders freely among human bodies and bodies of water. Transcendent, transfiguring, transformative. (Neil Young)

  • Over the Island

    On the island of Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, the act of leaving has become ingrained into the culture. Since the closure of its main industries, the Glace Bay coal mine and the Sydney steel plant, many young families have been forced to relocate, migrating thousands of miles in the pursuit of work. ‘Over the Island’ is an experimental documentary that follows a mother traveling back home to the island, and a filmmaker attempting to connect the past with the present. This film deconstructs the concept of ‘home’, and investigates how one’s sense of belonging, self identification and familial relationship are…

  • Rough Blazing Star

    A new experimental documentary film project from artist/filmmaker Christopher Wiersema examines anarchism, local history and memory, Emma Goldman’s writing, and a shared love of flowers. Told through a poetic inquiry and response to the text and research – beginning with a visit to the Old Labor Hall in Barre, Vermont – the social center of the Italian anarchist and socialist community in the early 1900’s.

  • Toronto, Old and New

    Allegedly “bursting at the seams” for over a century now, Toronto is cacophonous, cosmopolitan, and often confusing. A landscape shaped by generations of dreams and desires, the metropolis bears the overlapping imprints of capitalism, colonialism, conflict, community and celebration. Juxtaposing found footage, paper ephemera, and newly shot 16mm material, “Toronto, Old and New” explores the relationship between past and present in Canada’s largest city.