Film Categories: Culture

  • Farzana

    Inspired by a true story, Farzana (2021) is a short narrative film which revolves around the relationship of two middle-aged women and how they navigate their work in the home. Charmaine is a psychotherapist who works from home, and she hires Nasreen as a domestic worker to help her maintain her household. Nasreen is a recent migrant who is dealing with financial precarity. When there is a crisis in Nasreen’s family, she asks for assistance from Charmaine, but lack of trust between the two women results in hostility and conflict. We see all of this through the eyes of Zinnia,…

  • Modulations

    A short film about memory, dislocation and cultural identity.

  • Camera Trap

    CAMERA TRAP is a comparative installation using moving images a hundred years apart. The first half of the work looks at Muybridge as both animal and landscape photographer, compared with the second half which works with current animal camera/video traps from the rainforests of Sabah (Malaysian Borneo). A visual and aural comparison of domesticated versus wild animals. Staged shooting versus remote capture. Caged sounds from the zoo versus field recordings from the rainforests. How does the way we use camera equipment on documenting animals then and now, tell us about what we are looking for through the lens? In collaboration…

  • Matin Dans Une Foret de Pins (Morning in the Pine Forest)

    The lives of six young people unfold in a journey through different worlds revealed and interwoven, where the boundaries between documentary and fiction, reality and dream cease to exist. The volatile and seductive landscape of urban and rural Latvia was treated as a rich context for the complex relationships one has with the world – inviting the viewer to come upon the questions that bind us in our common need to understand our humanness. This film is based on the lives of HELENA, EVA, JANKA, GUNTIS, ANNA and GALC.

  • This is a Crisis

    An anonymous bureaucrat traipses around the City of Toronto, repurposing hostile architecture as their playground. Featuring spliced audio of former mayor John Tory’s victory speeches from 2014, 2018, and 2022 municipal election nights, bleak scenes are juxtaposed with a heavy-handed narrative of progress and inclusion. Documented on January 31, 2023—weeks before Tory would resign—this public performance and accompanying video artwork offer a critique of procedural fetishism, the surveillance and criminalization of poverty, and what cities become when they leave the most marginalized behind.

  • Over the Island

    On the island of Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, the act of leaving has become ingrained into the culture. Since the closure of its main industries, the Glace Bay coal mine and the Sydney steel plant, many young families have been forced to relocate, migrating thousands of miles in the pursuit of work. ‘Over the Island’ is an experimental documentary that follows a mother traveling back home to the island, and a filmmaker attempting to connect the past with the present. This film deconstructs the concept of ‘home’, and investigates how one’s sense of belonging, self identification and familial relationship are…

  • Rough Blazing Star

    A new experimental documentary film project from artist/filmmaker Christopher Wiersema examines anarchism, local history and memory, Emma Goldman’s writing, and a shared love of flowers. Told through a poetic inquiry and response to the text and research – beginning with a visit to the Old Labor Hall in Barre, Vermont – the social center of the Italian anarchist and socialist community in the early 1900’s.

  • Hier und Dort

    Since I arrived here in Germany from Korea, I always find myself in the unlearning situation. While I encounter completely different cultures, languages, situations, I have had to throw away a lot of what I have already learned and at the same time take away a lot of what I need to learn anew. I am already a learned person, but at the same time an unlearned person here.

  • Why is water so heavy? vol i. time never changed water

    In part of an ongoing autobiographical-fictional collection entitled “Why is water so heavy?” (c. 2022-present), interlocking the fluidity and borderless nature of water in relation to diaspora and landmarking. I dwell on self-ambiguity as time continues to spatialize fragments of my ancestral histories and cultural practices lost in water.

  • Toronto, Old and New

    Allegedly “bursting at the seams” for over a century now, Toronto is cacophonous, cosmopolitan, and often confusing. A landscape shaped by generations of dreams and desires, the metropolis bears the overlapping imprints of capitalism, colonialism, conflict, community and celebration. Juxtaposing found footage, paper ephemera, and newly shot 16mm material, “Toronto, Old and New” explores the relationship between past and present in Canada’s largest city.