Film Categories: Canada

  • L’Arrière-Pays

    An autobiographical fable at the cross-section between SCI-FI and Memory Film. The film explores the journey of two dreamers trapped between Past and Present, between Dream and Reality. It combines excerpts from an immigration journal, found text and images suspended in a dystopian dark space.

  • Meltwater

    Meltwater is an icy terrain that dissolves into sweeping waves of shadows. Blurring the horizon between the real and the imagined, the possible and the unthinkable, this vision is a meditation on global warming and its havoc on the rhythms of the natural world. In addition to festival presentation, Meltwater can be played as a seamless, infinite loop in a single or multi-channel installation.

  • Into the Wild

    A glimpse through the cracks, somebody is walking in the meadow, trees and flowers trembling in the wind. A world that only film can see, a material flow emerging from the coupling of camera, celluloid, silver salts, chemicals, light particles and the hand of the filmmaker. The film was entirely processed by hand and chemically treated: overexposed images were brought back to life with bleach, other images were solarized and reversed.

  • Hag’s Taper

    The many names of the herb mullein include hag’s taper, Jupiter’s rod, flannel leaf, velvet plant, felt-wort, tinder plant, candlewick plant, witch’s candle, lady’s foxglove, candlewick plant, torches, cowboy toilet paper, and more. Brought by European settlers to what is now known as Canada over 250 years ago, mullein is native to parts of Europe and Asia. The introduced plant was valued for its medicinal abilities and its use as a fish poison. Today, it is considered a noxious weed in so-called Alberta. This video was shot in the Crowsnest Pass, Alberta where mullein thrives in the disturbed sites including…

  • The Sweater

    Historian Carolyn Steedman, in writing about her own working-class childhood, describes how, for children of working-class families, it is often the mother and not the father who embodies power. The child experiences a father who is relatively powerless in the larger social world outside the home, so that even if he is physically powerful, as my father was, he can simultaneously be perceived as a weak man. “The Sweater” blends 16mm hand processed film with found footage and video to explore childhood memories triggered by finding the last thing my deceased father gave me. Using short vignettes, I tell several…

  • A Life on the Borderlands

    This is a film about my father, who immigrated to Montreal from Chile in the early 1970s after a hard-scrabble life on the streets of Santiago as a youth. Like my mother, who immigrated from Argentina around that time, his mobile life was characterised by neither chain migration nor lasting social ties with members of his ethnic group. His story is also a story about class, politics, and complicated histories of migration and exile.

  • A Parent’s Wishlist

    A short film about upward mobility and working class aspirations, A Parent’s Wishlist focuses on something that could be found in many North American homes between the mid-twentieth and early twenty-first centuries – a set of encyclopedias. Dragged from one city to another and across the country by my Chilean father, his Encyclopedia Britannica set came to symbolise his hope for a better life for both himself, and for me.

  • Dreams of Gold

    “Out at Zeballos, on the wet west coast of Vancouver Island, it rains and rains and practically never stops, but the people there don’t look for rainbows in the sky” Based on text from a gold miner’s journal, Dreams of Gold reveals his dreams and hallucinations while exploring the image of the mind as rooms in a house.

  • The Places We Lived

    The Places We Lived uses a large family archive of Super8 and digital home movies from the mid-1970s to late 1990s to grapple with the hopes, dreams, and disappointments of two South American immigrants who moved to Montreal in the wake of the excitement and optimism generated by Expo ’67. This story focuses on the father, Jose (“Pepe”), whose life in Canada followed four hardscrabble decades in Chile. A story about childhood and fatherhood, aging, capitalism, and obsolescence, The Places We Lived opens up new questions about class, memory, diasporic narratives, and the complicated histories of migration and exile.

  • Pappy’s Garden

    A personal tribute to the filmmaker’s grandfather, a first-generation immigrant to Toronto, Canada from Jamaica in the 1950s. Through both digital and super 8mm found family footage, Mike’s past catches up with him as he struggles with difficult memories from his childhood in Jamaica, finding comfort in his spectacularly over-grown garden.