Film Categories: Culture

  • Feet in Water, Head on Fire

    Along the San Andreas fault line in Southern California, Indigenous palm trees and date palms imported from West Asia flourish. The people who tend to them reflect a landscape of frictions and affections shaped over generations by agriculture, luxury real estate, and border politics. Like the infinity storytelling of The 1001 Nights, stories fold into dreams and back into stories, a constellation of voices settle over mountains and into the earth. Intertwining color 16mm with textural black and white film hand processed with the dates leftover from harvest and plants native to the valley Feet in Water, Head on Fire…

  • Muses

    A dancer wishes to break free from his unfaithful choreographer. In the midst of the deteriorating intimate relationship between a dancer and his older choreographer, the latter finds inspiration in another member of their company. This personal film delves into the intricate dynamics of inspiration, domination, and dependence within the LGBTQ+ dance world. It also depicts the raw experience of betrayal through the visceral and universal language of dance.

  • I’ve Heard a Siren Calling

    A Great Lake Surfer has recently began her transition as a Trans Woman. She now is having hesitations with putting her wetsuit back on, but something is calling her back. In the isolation of her cabin in a small fishing town, she seeks to find the courage to face her fears.

  • from where to where من وين لوين d’où vers où

    In the pieces I store and carry along my many different roads, my dialects may be signs of bruises but reclaimed they form the skin and voice I live in. Experiences of the where, from where, to where; a narrative amongst others. And as the words finally trickle through the needles, fingers seeping with tints trace the outline of whirling fields where I hang a jasmine branch on suspended necks and in the in-betweens, language soothes, swans mend, and the daily brings calm. We are the comfort of our multiples.

  • Where the snow-fed Rio del Llano met the edge of the desert

    Where the snow-fed Rio del Llano met the edge of the desert(2023 Length: 04:56 min), is a site specific film, in 2019 I visited the geographical location, Pear blossom Highway in California which is near the Antelope Valley (the armpit of California). A place also known as The Socialist Ruins. Here, Job Harriman, a socialist lawyer who ran for Vice President of the United States, Governor of California and Mayor of Los Angeles, founded in 1914 the cooperative colony – Llano del Rio which means plain by the river and the colony flourished for four years between 1914 to 1918.…

  • Peace

    Peace, takes its starting point from a super 8 found footage film material, and is a collaboration between me and Lisa Marr. I asked Lisa to read the word peace in 18 different languages; English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Dutch, Swedish, Russian, Polish, Hungarian, Greek, Turkish, Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, Hindi, Urdu. Sound/Voice: Lisa Marr

  • One Thing I Can Afford

    Louie Sanchez is the performance moniker of Filipinx artist Eirene Cloma. Cloma has recently completed a small collection of songs that broadly reflects on their working-class Filipinx upbringing in North Vancouver and the entanglements of diaspora, interracial relations, and queer desire that texture their everyday experiences. The video for their song One Thing I Can Afford broadly addresses queer and trans friendship in the diaspora, Filipinx masculinities, and everyday enactments of transgenerational care.

  • Building Heaven, Remembering Earth: Confessions of a Fallen Architect

    “Filmmaker Oliver Hockenhull’s shockingly beautiful digital video essay on the philosophy of architecture.” Mari Sasano Building Heaven, Remembering Earth offers a cross-cultural, pan-historical reflection on how the spiritual and intellectual aspirations of self and society are expressed in, and confined by, the language of architecture. “Beginning with a glimpse of Brueghel’s Tower of Babel, this wild and opinionated essay peruses some of the world’s most resonant architectural sites, among them the Pantheon of Rome, Palladio’s Rotunda, Renzo Piano’s New Metropolis, Barcelona for Gaudi, then Mies van der Rohe, the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, and Lingaraj Temple in Bhubaneswar, India. Director…

  • Cha ni chinu chi’in ñu’un / Construida de tierra / Built of Earth

    Cha ni chinu chi’in ñu’un / Construida de tierra / Built of Earth is an experimental documentary project consisting of a short film, a publication, and a collaborative installation that explores the immense and ancient family home at the centre of Jamiltepec, Oaxaca, Mexico. The cavernous adobe house is in the process of being restored after a devastating earthquake that saw a portion of its roof collapse in February 2018. The short film follows the restoration process, with its focus on traditional building materials and techniques, creative reuse, and local artisanal production. In doing so, it explores the origins of…

  • Facing the Music

    FACING THE MUSIC:ABOUT A MAN WHO ESCAPED STALIN AND HITLER—AND PUTIN’S RESURRECTION OF BOTH STALIN AND HITLER IN UKRAINE. Wolodymyr joined the Ukrainian partisans in 1939. They were hiding cultural lead- ers who would otherwise be persecuted or murdered by Stalin. After Hitler invaded in 1941, Wolodymyr was abducted to Germany, surviving forced labour and incar- ceration in a concentration camp. Extrapolating from Wolodymyr’s story, the film shows how the atrocities he experi- enced via Stalin and Hitler have been the ‘blueprint’ for Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Putin’s Wagner Group mercenaries were named after Hitler’s favourite composer: Richard Wagner. The…