Film Categories: Culture

  • GIK:SKWOD: How I lost My Indian Name

    In this experimental short film, a Seneca filmmaker shares how he lost his Native American “Indian” name. BACKGROUND: This is storytelling told through narration, images and text. In “Gik:skwod,” the filmmaker made cuts according to his eye blinks. During his film studies at Syracuse University, he read an excerpt from Walter Murch’s “In the Blink of an Eye: A Perspective on Film Editing.” In the excerpt, Murch explains how we naturally edit what we see through our eye blinks. The filmmaker created “Gik:Skwod” by experimenting with Murch’s editing concept.

  • Quimsacocha

    For the downstream communities of the high mountains of Quimsacocha, water is sacred. So when the giant Canadian company set their eyes to mine their land for gold and copper, 30-year-old Bolivar and 73-year-old Isaura were not happy. Isaura and Bolivar rely on water for their livelihood. Isaura owns four cows and Bolivar is in charge of the community’s water system. For them, water is life, and mining will jeopardize the future of their communities. Quimsacocha takes an honest look at these indigenous communities, their cultural traditions, and their lives in this picturesque landscape of the Western Andes Mountains in…

  • Vanilla

    Vanilla takes you through the everyday ordinary life of a disabled senior citizen living in Ottawa, Canada. It is a portrait documenting aging and the loneliness of those suffering in silence. The black and white film was shot on 16mm Bolex film camera using a KODAK 7222 Double-X Negative film. Processed by Niagara Film Lab (Toronto). Created as part of Independent Filmmakers Co-operative of Ottawa (IFCO) – Dogme Production Challenge.

  • ARTIFACT (circa 2006)

    The archaeology of Identity. Consider a world where all human communications are represented by numbers, a digital world. Imagine a future archaeologist finding a DV cassette from hundreds of years ago (a real found object, circa 2006, full length and uncut). Imagine trying to decode this ancient digital object, codecs unknown, obsolete, hardware long lost. Crack the code? Available algorithms scan, databases compare, construct, deconstruct, reconstruct the artifact. 2006, the dawn of self-by-numbers, digitized identity. What human fragments, fugitive narratives, remain? Do we have a future history? What will the algorithms decide? All bookings of this film include a free…

  • the framing of perception

    “I saw the light…” Sun, light, darkness, shadow — from time immemorial all weighted with significance and wonder. What mastery over nature, over others, to grasp the sun, control light itself! Know its speed, its heat, its colour, its radiation, its nature – is this not the power of the gods? Cinema is messaging with light and shadow. Figure and ground. Light, onto which we project significance, now transports our information. Perception shaped by our experiences, our interpretations, our projections, our illusions. Frames of drama and comedy, journalism and documentary, propaganda and advertising, all combined daily and edited, reproduced for…

  • Letters From Vancouver

    Letters from Vancouver (1973) comprise two films, made at the same time, that share a common interest in “the medium is the message” (McLuhan), and form a reflexive, self-referential enquiry into the film medium itself. Together, “the politics of perception” (33min)and “the framing of perception” (33min) form a meditation on our audio/visual creation, bearer of information and culture, meaning and representation. It is a medium with extraordinary powers, able to evoke the deepest feelings of love and loss, anger and fear, laughter and thoughtfulness, yet of great fragility, fading with time, precarious on a perforated strip of celluloid.

  • Take Me To Prom

    Featuring intimate, charming interviews with queer people ranging in age from 88 to 17, “Take Me To Prom” invites audiences to revisit an iconic adolescent milestone while telling a story of social change that spans more than 70 years. Image description: A smiling elderly person dressed in a white shirt and grey bowtie sits in a wheelchair, against a backdrop of frilled curtains. Rounds of sparkling light fall over the image.

  • The Ritual of the Sex Magick Warriors

    The Sex Magick Warriors are organizing, they reveal themselves to the city and risk it all to carry out an obscure objective. The colors pink and teal are the embodiment of Magick, Art and Sexuality and their use by the warriors -through empathy, telepathy and tactile care- spills the tea on their means for survival in these harsh urban environments. The ritual exposes the hardships of this army of lovers and reveals their sensual strategy for self preservation.

  • The Dandelion Club

    A gang of queer kids stylishly loiter about town. Pollinating. A collective resistance that collects at the margins of society and develops even on its fringes. No patch of concrete too solid to bloom through. An existence as a pest. A nuisance. And a fabulous one at that. Negotiating identity as: weed or flower?

  • wish

    Against the background of the Canadian prairies and the coast of Eastern Canada, wish explores Korean monosyllabic words. While counting to three in Korean, the video explores the multiple meaning of single-syllabic words from one to three that also signify work, labour, profit, etc. Using an observational lens, I documented my retired parents on a trip to the East Coast of Canada. In this video, I explore Canadian landscapes from a diasporic point of view revealing how new narratives emerge when immigrants engage with the Canadian landscape. wish is dedicated to my parents who contributed to the economic fabric of…