Film Categories: art & artists

  • Cathedral Bluffs

    “Cathedral Bluffs” is a satire about the interrelationships of consumerism, religion, and fine art. Consumers stream en masse through a shopping mall. The action freezes and the title of a Renaissance painting is superimposed on the resulting still. The film then cuts to the actual painting, superimposed with contemporary advertising copy.

  • Closer Outside

    “CLOSER OUTSIDE, the highlight of the program is an amazing film. Grenier, whose background includes painting, has a powerful command over color as an emotional hook, giving the film an anticipation and suspensefulness not generally associated with minimalist films. Just as the viewer is drawn into the sensuous presence of a setting, suddenly colors shift, objects seem dislocated in space, identities change, all creating an almost visceral shock of surprise to the viewer…” -George Howell, Buffalo EveningNews.

  • Catch

    “Catch is a fragmented observation on hidden reflective surfaces, the corner of a dormant television screen, a window…” -Mike Reynolds, Berkeley Barb

  • Mend

    Is it happening in the screening room or on the screen; in a snowstorm or inside; what isn’t surrounding and what is? From filming Ann sewing, on a grey winter day.

  • War Movie

    Two close friends leave a movie theatre after having seen a war movie. One is set off by it, and the other is ambivalent. This seemingly innocuous disagreement spirals into a larger point of contention between the two, unearthing deeper truths.

  • Rettet das Feuer (Rescue The Fire)

    Berlin, 1993. Photographer and artist, Jürgen Baldiga, battles HIV. In the 1990s, the AIDS epidemic reached its climax, to which no one was prepared. Infected bodies and their stories diminish, erasing their existence. Through the death of his friends and subsequently his own, Baldiga becomes the chronicler of his time: “I am taking a picture. I photograph the world. I exist.” Identity and history disappear without the persistence of memory. Until the final days of his life, Jürgen documents the exodus that seizes him. Rettet das Feuer (Rescue the Fire) directs the gaze to a piece of West Berlin history…

  • Through Foreign Eyes

    The filmmaker thought of making this poetic, mosaic documentary in a bookshop, when she came across the words of poet Manoel de Barros about “the accent of the place of our origin we carry in our eyes”. She never found the quote again, but in the course of the next few years, she carried out the project with the help of other contributors, mainly the film editor. She created a film essay combining reflections on the identity and ethnic roots of several natives of the Brazilian city of Recife, who live abroad, and the images of the places where they…

  • Commute

    Distinct fields on the same screen, foreground each other, invite comparisons, between different times and spaces, and the constructed and natural processes that inescapably defines us thru textures and emotional spaces. Commute does refer to regular travels between one place and an other, but also to substitutions, and exchanges.

  • 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…

  • Vanilla

    Vanilla takes you through the everyday ordinary life of a disabled senior citizen living in Ottawa, Canada. It is a portrait documenting aging and the loneliness of those suffering in silence. The black and white film was shot on 16mm Bolex film camera using a KODAK 7222 Double-X Negative film. Processed by Niagara Film Lab (Toronto). Created as part of Independent Filmmakers Co-operative of Ottawa (IFCO) – Dogme Production Challenge.