Film Categories: Capitalism + Economics

  • light in my eyes

    A personal and poetic walk through light, love, and memories of a blind grandfather. Artist/filmmaker Christopher Wiersema considers his grandfather’s enigmatic and eloquent point of view while playing with his own. The film’s soundscape centers around a phone call with the artist’s grandmother, Rina Pullia, as she reflects on caregiving for her husband, Angelo, in Chicagoland.

  • Dear Friend, Where Have You Gone?

    For Jayden Martin, art is more than just a hobby. It’s his escape, his passion, and his lifeline. But as an artist in the small, rural community of Englehart, Ontario, Jayden’s dreams of making it big seem almost impossible. Despite growing up with divorced parents and struggling with addiction, mental health, and suicide, he remains determined to succeed. “Dear Friend, Where Have You Gone?” offers a rare glimpse into Jayden’s world as he navigates the challenges of small-town life and grapples with his own inner demons. This powerful documentary is an inspiring reminder of human resilience and the transformative power…

  • Passengers

    In 2024 I decided to visit some places I had been to before, places near where I am in the present and places I’ve never been to in the past. As I travelled from here to there, filming this and that I was reminded once again that nothing stands still and nothing stays the same. One of the things that I always wondered about was the intention of the occupied places I would see and what determined the way in which they were expressed. Sometimes it seemed clear while at other times it didn’t appear clear at all. I was…

  • Precipice

    Moving images & Music: Kent Tate 4k Humans create narratives about themselves then make great effort to conform reality to that narrative. This wasn’t a threat to planetary survival 10,000 years ago when we were scattered in small bands worshiping local deities and relying on nearby gathered foodstuffs with only stone tools. It’s quite another thing when we are packed into mega-cities with nuclear weapons and ambiguous connectivity with relationships imbued in instruments that far exceed an individual’s capacity to fully comprehend or to reliably navigate our various systems. The earth spins around the sun at 30 km/sec. The habitable…

  • A Fiscal Life

    Capital is unavoidably ingrained into every day life. Influenced by the quote attributed to Fredric Jameson; “it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” A film created from the frustration and struggle of how it’s nearly impossible to imagine surviving without money in the world today. It’s such a necessary part of living that that you could say it’s part of our DNA, and for art it’s no different. It’s physically, violently, part of everything we do and see.

  • Perplexity

    See the liminal spaces of abandoned offices and adjacent corridors through the eyes of someone who feels at home in them. The entity’s wanderings, punctuated by close-ups of materials or digital surfaces, provide an opportunity for empathy with something that, like us, is looking for a way out. Meanwhile, electronic music, permeated by the fragile vocals of Vaclav Pelousek, embraces the mise-en-scène in an almost redemptive gesture. Perplexity is a journey that traverses the non-human condition, as seen from a non-human perspective. It asks its viewers to seek solidarity with a non-human person. Utilizing a distinctive blend of animation techniques…

  • Artifacts

    Artifacts connects fragments of an audiovisual transmission from a distance. In the fog of the events that unfold, the outlines of actors appear, revealing a catastrophe that they have caused. Artifacts is a speculative fiction film that combines computer animation created in Unity3D with documentary footage from the present day and from the archive. The footage is complemented by a deep fake actress, and AI also entered the film-making process when writing the script – the film captures situations directly proposed by a neural network. As speculative fiction, Artifacts depicts an ecological disaster that seeps from reality into the virtual…

  • Endless Thirst

    Endless Thirst is a deep dive into the otherworldly and misunderstood bog biome. Filmed in Canada, it draws attention to the harm inflicted on these ancient wetlands. An aerial view of a bog in its natural state suddenly sinks into the unimaginable, then appears to evaporate into ghostly images of Sphagnum moss (a bog’s keystone species) imprinted on 16mm film. Endless Thirst alludes to the bog’s reliance on water for survival and humanity’s unquenchable desire for resource and supply. It examines the entanglement of human and more-than-human processes that link to the climate crisis.

  • En Memoria

    In a dystopian future, a mother struggles to finish making her daughter’s quinceañera dress.

  • S Division

    Toronto 2012. Sotheby’s International Realty, a division of Sotheby’s Art Auction House, promotes a lakeside condo development using Impressionist-and-Surrealist-derived imagery. The ads on hoarding, billboards, and other media are often sexist and delve into the absurd: for instance, a ballet dancer doing a tour jeté underwater amongst a school of fish. And it becomes apparent the developers considered only young white childless couples as potential clients—no humans of any other type. “An unwelcome side effect of the Avant-garde’s success was its appropriation by the “art of advertising .” For the Avant-garde could no longer be distinguished from the Avant-garde of…