Film Categories: Childhood

  • Dear Grandpa

    Using my grandfather’s old eight-millimetre film camera, I explore the deteriorating relationship I had with my grandfather during his final days after being diagnosed with cancer.

  • Hatch

    After Marcy suffers a horrible miscarriage, she is plagued with daily reminders that keep her bound to her solitude. Though her mother makes valiant efforts to help her cope, her guilt outweighs her willingness to move on. One night, she discovers a strange alien egg buried in her backyard. She brings it inside, apprehensive at first, but begins to form a motherly bond with it. When the aliens return for the egg, it is trapped inside her home and can’t get out, leaving it stranded on earth. Marcy must now decide if she’s really ready to move on from her…

  • THREE BORDERS

    “Three Borders” is a found-footage film reminiscent of Chris Marker’s “La Jetée” (1962). It consists of family photos of the artist and other anonymous found (family) photos. In the style of Magic Realism, the video narrates anecdotes from the families of Alisa Berger’s Jewish father and her North Korean mother. The ten stories narrate the meeting between Koreans and Jews from Galicia. They address the overcoming or the construction of inner, outer, national, ethnic, spiritual or emotional borders which span three generations.

  • Heimat

    The short film “Heimat” is one story from ten stories in “Three Borders.” It is the story of the filmmaker’s father about migration and homeland. “Three Borders” is a 55-minute found-footage film reminiscent of Chris Marker’s “La Jetée” (1962). It consists of family photos of the artist and of other anonymous found (family) photos. In the style of Magic Realism, the video narrates anecdotes from the families of Alisa Berger’s Jewish father and her North Korean mother. They address the overcoming or the construction of inner and outer borders which span three generations.

  • Four Short Animated Films

    Four short animated films on one reel: The Magician’s Hat: A magician discovers more than a white rabbit in his hat with hilarious results. Making Faces: A simple blank figure is transformed into eighty different characters. A study of the variety of human faces. Alleycats: Alleycats are disappearing all over town! The solution to this mystery may lie behind the curtains of an apartment building. Computer animation. Eye to Eye: In this computer-animated film a man loses control of the parts of his face. Note: Also available from the filmmaker are four flipbooks from the Books That Move Series.

  • Nadia’s Songs

    “Nadia’s Songs” follows a teenage boy who finds a collection of CDs that used to belong to a stranger known only as Nadia. In their shared taste in music he imagines her life story while in turn reflecting on his own. One part essay and one part love letter to second-hand music shops, “Nadia’s Songs” explores the many ways we can forge our identities through the art we consume and things we collect as young adults.

  • Leagan (Peppermint Ashes)

    It has been a many years since Irina and her mother left Romania to live in Montreal. Away from their family, Irina becomes disconnected and absorbed in virtual worlds which separate her from her mother. When she is faced with the passing of a grandparent, she turns to her closest ally in an attempt to understand the meaning of loss and family through distance and time.

  • (tourism studies)

    Sometimes it’s not until the project is finished that I begin to know what the project is about. I’d been sifting through this footage: travel movies, home movies, fragments from projects that never became more than that. It was the summer of 2018 that I began assembling these parts, working intuitively, letting the process guide me and I began to realize that I’d made a Rorschach test for myself, a formalist self-portrait of my Belgian-Japanese-American-Jew heritage and a personal emotional journey following my mother’s passing, my father’s remarriage, and Emma having my child. January 2019 while shooting in Hong Kong,…

  • Contents

    An old wallet, abandoned intact, kept for unknown reasons. Uncorroborated memories of a close (but distant) relation. How are these documents speaking to each other? What is the nature of their harmony? Official versus living memory: each useless, unstable, disintegrating. Is memory the bureaucracy of the self? How does it order our lives?

  • The Shouting Flower

    A work about collaboration and process, “The Shouting Flower” approaches political resistance from multiple subject positions–plant, child, filmmaker–in an attempt to model what Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing calls “work across difference.” Using images processed in plant material that was gathered at key locations throughout the city, as well as direct animation and audio recorded on a child’s toy, the film documents its own creation within a landscape of hostility and neglect. A collaboration against cooperation, it becomes as it refuses. Refusing, dispersing, it shouts, “No!”