Film Categories: body

  • This is a Crisis

    An anonymous bureaucrat traipses around the City of Toronto, repurposing hostile architecture as their playground. Featuring spliced audio of former mayor John Tory’s victory speeches from 2014, 2018, and 2022 municipal election nights, bleak scenes are juxtaposed with a heavy-handed narrative of progress and inclusion. Documented on January 31, 2023—weeks before Tory would resign—this public performance and accompanying video artwork offer a critique of procedural fetishism, the surveillance and criminalization of poverty, and what cities become when they leave the most marginalized behind.

  • meditations on a process

    An experimental documentary exploring the filmmakers’ mutual interests in spirituality, imprints of childhood, and ecologies of presence in personal filmmaking practices, bookended by poetry that situates their musings in a rapidly changing Toronto.

  • Concrete Shape

    To face your fear, you must let it enter your life as a Concrete Shape. An onsite video performance by Jesi Jordan created at the Diego Rivera Anahuacalli Museum in Mexico City. This film is made using hand made special effects and biodegradable materials such as Oaxacan clay, lava rocks, chicken eggs, cactus husks, and water.

  • Negative / Positive Film

    Negative / Positive Film is a hand-made, camera-less collage film composed of layers of erotic 16mm films from the 1920s, 1940s, and 1970s, intermingled with nature documentaries and layers of organic materials. This visual abstraction merges together both positive black-and-white film and its negative black-and-white counterpart – on the same film base. This allows the film to exist in two versions, one positive and, the other negative. The film is an abstract remediation of female bodies dislodged from their original erotic context and ripped away from their male co-protagonists. The man is removed from the picture, while the female body…

  • Self-Portrait in Hell

    Self-Portrait in Hell is a hybrid film that combines analog and digital film manipulation techniques. Multiple layers of 8mm films and disparate fragments are amalgamated to create a self-portrait of the director. A singular self-portrait, since ironically the subject of the film is not the director but the image found in abandoned film archives, the image of another, unknown woman. The first layer is from a 1970s 8mm home movie titled Woman Dancing with Dog and was found in an antique shop. The second layer is an 8mm film belonging to an unknown archive, which the artist buried for a…

  • Motus

    Using the long take and still framing, this film evokes the movement of Montreal as a city rapidly changing through massive construction projects while also experiencing a housing crisis. Not so much a city symphony, “Motus” seeks to create a sleep-like state through abstract lines, muddy grain, and other forms of frame and shutter movement. An homage to the prog-rock scores of the Italian horror films of the 1970s, the music harkens back to the era when I discovered cinema in Montreal movie places such as the Imperial. Utilisant le long plan et le cadrage immobile, ce film évoque le…

  • I’ve Heard a Siren Calling

    A Great Lake Surfer has recently began her transition as a Trans Woman. She now is having hesitations with putting her wetsuit back on, but something is calling her back. In the isolation of her cabin in a small fishing town, she seeks to find the courage to face her fears.

  • Peace

    Peace, takes its starting point from a super 8 found footage film material, and is a collaboration between me and Lisa Marr. I asked Lisa to read the word peace in 18 different languages; English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Dutch, Swedish, Russian, Polish, Hungarian, Greek, Turkish, Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, Hindi, Urdu. Sound/Voice: Lisa Marr

  • We Are We Come We Go

    A meditation on time and acquaintances; a walk through a maze; the artist draws a circular path.

  • xīn nī 廖芯妮

    xīn nī 廖芯妮 (“understanding you”) is an intimate auto-ethnographic portrait expressed through dance and digital technologies. Liaw engages in intergenerational conversations with her family and community to transform the linguistic divide between her Chinese name and its Hakka translation into a space for healing. Drawing on themes of decolonizing queerness to emphasize self-love and self-curiosity, the work explores both physical and technological attachments. Bodies made up of 3D-rendered cultural objects hold space for the stories of Liaw’s elders, while expanding the growing web of her ancestral knowledge.