Film Categories: Capitalism + Economics

  • Ofenheizung: Portrait of a Stove

    In Berlin in the year 2020, there are still homes that rely on coal stoves for heating, despite their ban in 2015 by the Federal Emission Control Ordinance. This short film is a portrait of one of those stoves, the maintenance it requires of the inhabitant of the home it’s in, and what it means for its Kiez, Kreuzberg.

  • RGB

    A mantra of self-optimisation, not unlike the nervous state of mind of a new-economy entrepreneur.

  • Housebound

    The film combines a scene taken from the movie Copycat (1995) with footage of my editing the film. It is a reflection on the idea of artistic originality as well as the art world’s constant desire to instantly transform everything – even the current health crisis – into works of art. Housebound was commissioned by this year’s edition of the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen. It is my contribution to the festival’s discussion: “Can and should one make films now?”

  • 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.

  • I Dream of Vancouver

    In a reality continually refracted through the lens of corporate technology, what remains of those who don’t fit into this vision of the world? I Dream of Vancouver is an experimental short that explores this question through the digital landscape of Vancouver, BC. Using hypnagogic visuals and a haunting soundscape, this work expresses the detachment from the lived experience of spaces as these spaces are subsumed by algorithms and mediated images. While focusing on Vancouver as a case study, this documentary explores issues that are relevant to the world at large, such as the link between corporate technologies and gentrification…

  • COPING

    A bunch of monsters are trying to relax after a long day of work.

  • 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…

  • Orgy of the Blood Parasites

    J. G. Ballard’s novel High-Rise and Cronenberg’s film Shivers, both of which detail an apartment building’s descents into chaos, were released in 1975, creating a collision in history as fascinating as it is bizarre. Both are about non-normative sex in imposing spatialities and both are visions of disturbed surrealist dystopia of body mutations. Later in his career, in 1996, Cronenberg adapted a J. G. Ballard novel with the fetishistic film Crash, but in Shivers, dread and disgust circulate spatially around the apartment complex on Nun’s Island, next to the city of Montréal, to which I have returned. I bring together…

  • 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.

  • 7FF on¢idia

    In ancient China the skin of the tiger was the representation of “continuous changing”; in Mayan world through the path of Bolom Chon (Jaguar) they could read constellations: the dance of cosmos. Fluxes are grouped in the film; spotted-jaguar, “7 pancadas”, speckled plants, ounce (oz), “golden spider”. Matter-energy-information varies. Side by side communication, surplus value of code. Commodities, bit coins, mountains of data. 7FF on¢idia: real impossibilia of capital life.