Film Categories: Canada
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Landing Sites
There are places that we seek, and there are places that find us. One can never know for sure which comes first; the seeking or the finding. Often the unexpected moment occurs, the unforeseen discovery. Landing Sites: Truck on a house – Car drifting on a flooded plain – Signs flying over a lake – A super storm engulfs a building – Ghost train – Lightening strikes a plywood structure – Rail yard secured by a fire fighter – Electrical discharge in central city – Outskirts of prairie dog town. Landing Sites in order of appearance: House on a truck…
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Prairie Grizzly’s Peneplain
“Prairie Grizzly’s Peneplain” is a meditation on various natural and manufactured landscapes in southern Saskatchewan. This region is part of an ancient Precambrian seabed rebounding from the last Ice Age which once had a dynamic range of wildlife, plants, and wetlands supporting various ancient cultures that flourished here for millennia. Up until the late 1800‘s the Prairie Grizzly thrived on the Canadian Prairies. The bears that managed to migrate further west to the Rocky Mountains faced a difficult transition, although they have managed to survive in their new homes. Along with the plains buffalo, the have become a presence in…
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Expo Film (this film is my memory)
Using anonymous home movie footage of Expo ’67 in Montreal, the artist sets out to recreate a memory that perhaps never existed. Celluloid manipulation and sound decay techniques coalesce to transform a mythic landscape into a sublime expanse of disintegrated memory. Image description: A Grainy and nostalgic image from an amusement park. A red gondola of a sky ride is in the foreground and crowds and a ferris wheel are in the background.
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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…
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still
A meditation on holding on in isolation, made with a personal cell phone and limited equipment at the beginning of the Coronavirus pandemic in Ottawa.
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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.
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Ruines
Sur l’autoroute 15, juste à l’extérieur de Montréal, se dresse un monument à la Révolution tranquille : les écrans en décomposition du Ciné Parc Laval, ouvert en 1971, l’année où les ciné-parcs ont marqué l’histoire du Québec. En 1947, sous la pression de l’Église catholique, les ciné-parcs sont interdits au Québec. C’était la tentative de l’Église de réglementer le sexe en dehors de la sphère domestique. À l’origine un drive-in à 2 salles de cinéma, le Ciné Parc Laval est rapidement devenu 4 écrans en raison de sa popularité. Ce film utilise des segments de Frissons (1975) de David Cronenberg…
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Xam
Xam is a sci-fi exploration on the future of surveillance and body hacking. While in the London subway, an unsuspecting man opens a strange text, rendering him unconscious and dragging him through a wormhole. He awakes, lost, on the train tracks in Kiev, Ukraine, unable to communicate with friends or family. With the help of the hacker community in Kiev, and then Paris, the man harnesses alternative virtual transmissions in an attempt to find his way home. Xam is told through an intimate, first-person frame and video collage to emphasize the increasing integration of human and technology. The story is…
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ARIES
A single window frame; a portal. As the circular nature of time begins to reveal itself, a new decade begins.
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Like A Canon
Li’l bunny moves past her fear of losing her home and into action and recruitment. A commissioned work for the ECHO PARK FILM CENTER in celebration of their 14th year of operation. Created and presented in part with hand-processed Black & White super 8 film.
