Film Categories: Childhood

  • The Beautiful Room is Empty

    “Haddad’s The Beautiful Room is Empty explores the loaded memories of space through his aunt, Marie, (re)visiting her childhood home and recalling the abuse she endured there. […] What have the walls been listening to? What have they absorbed, retained, and released upon a return, a farewell?” – Sarah Sarofim, Canadian Art

  • Tiger Eats a Baby

    Accompanied by his young cub, an orphaned stray roams industrial landscapes, longing for the return of his one true companion.

  • MAN MADE

    MAN MADE, a repurposed narrative of a boy who gets introduced to the wonders of life by a beautiful shining trumpet. But the struggle to be oneself has only begun. Utilizing found 16mm footage and both digital and analog manipulation techniques, Mikkola pierces conventional masculinity with a transformative queer gaze.

  • Homunculi

    Filmed sporadically and intuitively during the summer months of 2020 and 2021, Homunculi is a recontextualization of a personal archive of hand processed 16mm “home movies” and various cinematographic experiments. Reassembled, these once disparate images form a cinematic prism in which to view and confront the prevalent anxieties of an increasing uncertain future. Homunculi is a visual and sonic daydream, reaching beneath the facade of domestic and pastoral tranquility to reveal a lurking, inevitable force that promises to tear the world asunder.

  • Arrival 1, Arrival 2

    This experimental essay film springs from the final days of December 2020 when I moved from Chicago to Toronto. The film documents my move and then continues on alternate paths, weaving through the liminal spaces of borders, sickness, interpellation, and dreams. Content Note: This film contains extended discussions about fatphobia and disordered eating. Specifically, this film contains descriptions of food restriction, idealization of thinness, and intense emotional and physical pain after eating. After 11:41 there is no direct discussion of disordered eating. Flashing lights throughout. Loud noises throughout.

  • Savage / Future

    Editing to the soundscape of shaking Iroquois white corn and finger tapping, Seneca filmmaker Terry Jones uses personal and historic still images to link his family and the American Indian Residential Boarding School experience.

  • Don’t Forget The Water

    A phone conversation sets the diasporic table as a disembodied figure prepares Qahwah Arabi / Arabic Coffee. Here, the contradictions inherent in Google Translate’s instant camera feature are made visible through glitched mistranslations. Using these flaws as a prompt, the communication between a mother and a daughter considers ambiguity as a source of embodied knowledge. 

  • Grandpa’s Fingers

    A grandfather recounts a story to his two young granddaughters, explaining what happened to his fingers. A short fable about family, storytelling, and cannibalism that gives new meaning to the phrase “finger food.”

  • How amazingly unlikely is your birth

    What could a cosmology of one person’s life look like? A daughter examines the life and premature death of her father, who had a troubled relationship with the psychiatric medical establishment and was passionate about ecology, politics and space travel.

  • No Mime Game

    An effective mime-skit showing the perils of drinking and driving. A mixture of mime, camera work, and special effects prepares us to expect the inevitable crash. An excellent film for use in driver and health education or dramatic arts classes.