Film Categories: Architecture

  • 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…

  • Abandoned

    An unfinished housing complex has been abandoned. The imagined future from the past is taken over by foliage and wildlife.

  • Waiting (انتظار)

    A young woman journeys to visit her grandmother. What transpires between the unsaid and silence propels into a prolonged moment of tension and desires of connection. Image description: A young woman and her grandmother sit next to each other on a couch. They both look straight ahead with stony-faced expressions, not talking.

  • On A Clear Day You Can See The Revolution From Here

    An expansive journey through the Kazakh steppe, On A Clear Day You Can See the Revolution From Here excavates layers of myth, history and geology to reveal the shifting fault lines between a government, its people and their land. The film brings into focus Kazakhstan’s search for a post-Soviet identity and a state-sponsored programme of cultural production that on the one hand connects back to the ancient folklore and belief systems of the Silk Road, while on the other, seeks to embrace the values of Western capitalism. Taking an experimental documentary form, On A Clear Day provides a meditative faux…

  • My Gentrification

    “A voice tells us: “a friend of mine drew a circle on a map and said, ‘this is where you wanna live’.” The this refers to a subsection of Toronto between Bathurst and Dufferin streets, but it could just as easily refer to the city as a whole, an area bustling with life. Or, at least it did. Marcos Arriaga’s “My Gentrification,” explores the changes in the ever-gentrifying metropolis through the lens of archival footage they procured through decades of documentation. There’s a real Jonas Mekas vibe to Arriaga’s film, which is replete with voiceover narration and grainy celluloid archival…

  • Jatun LLaxta, Noh Kaah…

    A short experimental film that explores ancient native cities in America. Images of Machu Pichu, Sacsayhuaman, Uxmal, Chichen Itza, and Mesa Verde had been blow up from Super 8 to 16 mm, handheld developed and reticulated to create an evocative view of our past.

  • La Montagne

    Repeated gesture of panoramic representation becomes abstraction. This film takes place on the Kondiaronk Belvedere where people come to see the Montreal skyline and its surrounding landscape.

  • Lines of Force

    The law of general relativity states that all matter is condensed energy. In its purest form, energy is light. Perhaps matter cannot go faster than light because all matter consists of light. (For Paul Clipson.)

  • Vienna

    A meditation on timeless landscapes and the transience of vision.

  • 581 Bloor Street West

    A chunk of Toronto’s real estate, a historical landmark in fact, as it sits, in a state of sad transition.