Film Categories: art & artists

  • Imaginary City

    3D animations are typically used by architects to make their designs more vivid. Often a wonderful world is drawn, which seems to be almost perfect. Colossal structures, skyscrapers or apartment buildings,mostly built of ferroconcrete, appearing in the most dazzling colors. The building boom seems to have no limits. But one problem is looming already : The sand needed for the production of concrete runs short. Most natural, easily accessible sand deposits have been exploited, this makes the industry turning to the sand on the sea floor. The results are sinking islands, disappearing beaches and the marine ecosystem is severely damaged.…

  • Derby and Groma

    While taking a stroll in Buenos Aires on his birthday several years ago, photo collector Pablo Cruz Aguirre came across an unusual gift. Blowing down the street towards him was a collection of letters, postcards and photos depicting a performing duo named Derby and Groma. This collection of artifacts contained a fragmented narrative of two people. Desolina Merlino, alias Derby, was born 1891 and of Italian descent. Samuel Salomón Gromatzky, alias Groma, was the son of Jewish immigrants in Argentina, born in 1895. Under the name of Derby and Groma, the two performed acrobatic dance routines in variety theaters throughout…

  • Rhizomatic Directed Simulation

    The movie opens with a quote from Borges: “The best imitation consists of the original’s destruction and the creation of a self referential text.” While a galaxy of Super 8 luxuries erupt, the film hand processed, the emulsion cracked in order to reveal its silver secrets, a silhouetted camera operator attempts to contain the experience, even as he is subjected to the same chemical disintegrations. — Mike Hoolboom

  • Festival of Light

    A record of illumination on the darkest night of the year, during an annual celebration held in Kensington Market, Toronto.

  • Mono

    Mono (2015) is a mystical film on monolithic architecture, monophonic music and the ancient female old. A celebration of slowness. A dense video-audio dynamic, demanding and minimal, suggests a mysterious background story, a genesis of drone and stones. Alongside with atmospheric static shots of various ancient and modern monoliths (including an artificial one), the tale is performed in three languages (English, Welsh and Old Norse) narrated by women of different generations and cultures representing the ancient past, the current presence and the distant future. No actual reference to time or place is made. Six musicians have designed music for different passages…

  • Pivot

    Several years ago I came across a book by body language expert Joe Navarro where he describes physical gestures and how to determine whether someone is experiencing high stress or low stress with the ultimate aim of decoding whether someone is lying or telling the truth. Pivot is a recording of these enacted gestures after a computer algorithm has randomized them. The algorithm is based on an audio recording of morning birds where the randomness of the birds chirping was used to determine the randomness of the placement of gestures in the script. The performance was recorded inside the legal…

  • White Condo

    In this hyper-real age of simulated imagery and self-curated surveillance, many artists are returning to metaphors of authenticity and duplication to investigate the particular character of this post-millennial moment. Theorists like Virilio have interrogated the ways in which contemporary seeing modifies experience, encouraging the extreme desire for other worlds and, essentially, for disappearance itself. White Condo is my ironic attempt to contribute to this complex terrain, a satiric project for exploring the myriad dysfunctional ways that we humans attempt to ‘master’ ourselves and our increasingly artificial environments.

  • Color Neutral

    A color explosion sparkles, bubbles, and fractures in this hand-crafted 16mm film. Reeves utilized an array of mediums and direct-on-film techniques to create this boisterous, psychedelic morsel of cinema as material. Reeves’ soundtrack mixes samples from rusty, dusty old machines, records, and electric waves to create an aural passage through technological progress.

  • Far Shore, The

    Set in 1918 Ontario. Eulalie, a Quebecoise, marries a Toronto engineer but finds life with him oppressive. She falls in love with Tom, a painter who is an acquaintance of her husband’s and, with him, escapes briefly to Northern Ontario before they are hunted down by her jealous husband. “For something like two decades, Joyce Wieland – the Toronto painter, filmmaker, quiltmaker and lay ecologist – has been creating an individual sensibility and then displaying it, piece by piece, in the various art forms that have suited her purposes. In ‘The Far Shore’, her feature film, she articulates that sensibility…

  • Cairo In One Breath

    Every day, people are being replaced by machines. The adhan is a 1,400 year-old oral tradition in the process of unprecedented change in Cairo. After 60 generations, thousands of individual muezzins are being replaced by a single voice broadcast from a radio station as part of a plan of the Mubarak regime. As the Adhan Unification Project takes hold, Egypt undergoes Revolution and regime change. The film follows muezzins from when they heard rumors of the AUP through its implementation, which since 2010 has displaced thousands.