Film Categories: Architecture

  • 24.24.24

    24.24.24. is a view of a day in concurrent time. All of the day’s twenty-four hours are presented at once. In the minutia of time, banal events unfold and are made extraordinary through the camera’s gaze. People go to work and to school, time is stretched and skewed, the act of taking a walk or watering a lawn develops a magical quality. Light gains character, shadow reshapes objects, and time becomes palpable. Take a look.

  • Pierre Radisson – Fjord and Gulf

    “Pierre Radisson – Fjord and Gulf” presents the daily activity and environment of its eponymous Canadian Coast Guard Icebreaker. The CCGS Pierre Radisson works year round providing escorts for commercial shipping to ports cut-off by ice, scientific and search and rescue support, among other activities. Shot during the Pierre Radisson’s work on the Saguenay Fjord and Gulf of St. Lawrence in Quebec during February 2016, the film provides a window into a portion of the invisible labour underpinning the Canadian economy. The film brings the deep winter landscapes of coastal Quebec into dialogue with intensive industrial activity of ore shipments…

  • Farewell Transmission

    The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation opened the doors of the CBK Transmitter Station in 1939 to serve the prairie region of Canada. “Farewell Transmission” is equal parts an indexical record of the demolition of CBK in 2015 and a subjective response to the residual media documenting the event. The building is framed with tension preceding its destruction: emulsion pulsated as if with decades of radio transmission, creating an unsettled eulogy for a cultural institution. Selected screenings: Dobra Festival Internacional de Cinema Experimental (Brazil, 2017); Festival du nouveau cinéma (Montréal, QC, 2017); Antimatter Media Art (Victoria, BC, 2017) Best Short Film, Saskatchewan…

  • Lunch Time

    In this film we drive through downtown Cairo. While exploring the urban life and daily routine of the streets near Tahrir square, we sink into a labyrinth where our path keeps on being cut. During the 2011 revolution it was often said that “the people took back the streets”, but since then the police and military have returned to power and show their supremacy by controlling the public spaces, leaving many to adapt to a system where they have no voice and must work around the obstacles that are left behind.

  • The Williamsburg Houses

    This film gazes into the architecture and lives of the occupants of one of the most ambitious public housing projects ever built in the US. Exploring the remains of a utopian design in contemporary context, we are immersed in the life of a building and a community.

  • The Exile (Pituvahalaya)

    Shot improvisationally in 2010, shortly after the end of the Sri Lankan civil war, this film takes a lyrical approach to examining recent history and the process of reconstruction in the post-war era. The visions of an exile are carried through an immoral silence, to an end both dubious and bittersweet. World premiere at 64th Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, 2018

  • Building History: The Story of Benjamin Brown

    A portrait of Toronto’s first practicing Jewish architect. Working at a time of anti-Semitism in the city, Benjamin Brown’s buildings stand as a testament to Toronto’s cultural and industrial history.

  • Utopia

    The purpose of this or that, or its role in enabling a sense of security or status is ephemeral, depending on factors that may or may not be readily apparent. As systems shift from one emphasis to an other, or as one system supplants an other, the meaning of something can be altered to such a degree that a new description may be required to understand its context. Various intersections in downtown Vancouver including the Trump Tower looming over the other buildings – Fishing Boat approaches Ucluelet after some time out at sea – Afternoon clouds, Crowsnest Mountain – Lonely…

  • Cleveland: The Resurrected Arcade

    “The dreaming collective…through the arcades, communes with its own insides” – Walter Benjamin. A visit to the restored arcade in post-industrial Cleveland, the piece uses architectural footage and archival audio to explore the city’s repeated efforts in urban renewal.

  • The Forms of Utility

    A short film essay analyzing a landscape shaped by religion, capital, and war. The film blurs the line between memory and history, only to reveal their cyclicity. The focus of this work is the mistreatment of the modernist architecture of Zilina, a small town in Slovakia, built by a growing Jewish minority in the 1920s and 30s and by new settlers from rural areas in the 50s and 70s. Their tastes and ideologies have been visibly projected onto the town.