Film Categories: (De)colonization

  • Brimming

    A fire burns. Water flushes out the chemical leak. Will a historical moment rise to the surface?

  • connecting thru grasses

    Looking to prairie grass ecosystems, as well as the technologies that map and reflect the diminishing biome, connecting thru grasses considers how we might both map and define prairie boundaries anew. Considering how satellites passing overhead reflect an image of the earth (and thus of ourselves) back to us, and how these images shape or mis-shape our understanding of the land and our relationship to it, the work looks closer at TERRA, a research satellite that has circled the earth since 1999 constructing images for use in the monitoring of environmental and climate data. http://cbattle.com/connecting-thru-grasses/

  • Lion in the Wind

    Fugue for wushu in the West.

  • After Bed

    Pulsing flashbacks from the summer of love reawaken a queer California classic.

  • the smallest steps

    What does it take to have a voice? For women whose voices are often suppressed, the journey is full of challenges. Many quit along the way. But in Ottawa, Ontario, two law students and two survivors of violence have decided to take a stand and join the anti-violence movement. The only trouble is, they don’t know how to be activists. In their homes and on the streets, they take their first activist steps while veteran activists provide historical context to the movement. If they can overcome the personal and political barriers that threaten to derail them, they will join a…

  • The Translation is Approximate

    This video focuses a conversation that Naqvi witnessed between her aunt and a domestic worker over financial matters. For many reasons — the ambivalence of the situation, the respective socioeconomic positions of the two women involved in the scene, and the very nature of the recording, which careened between documentary and voyeurism — these images have long haunted Naqvi. In the Translation is Approximate (2021), Naqvi retrieves the original footage that she shot in 2013 and traces back her thoughts about what motivated her to revisit this material. This short video both provides insight into her approach and fundamentally questions…

  • Seaview

    Seaview (2015) is an experimental film which combines home video and captured footage from Karachi, Pakistan. Naqvi travels back to her family’s country of origin to compare childhood memories of this place with lived experience. In the first sequence, she shows video footage of her first trip to Clifton Beach in Karachi. The accompanying text describes her visit to the same beach seventeen years later, and the difficulties in trying to document this place, both as an image maker and as a woman. Naqvi confronts her own personal struggle of being caught between the ideals of Western and Eastern societies.…

  • 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,…

  • Lines Drawn

    Shot in two downtown Toronto parks over the course of the pandemic, Lines Drawn looks at various measures of persuasion, containment and control that were brought to bear over the course of the City’s attempts to curtail the spread of COVID-19. Throughout the pandemic, space was defined by how the social bond was re-formed and which barriers were designed for mutual and directional protection. What are the shapes of the pandemic and how did they shape our interactions with each other? Supported by Media City Film Festival’s Chrysalis Fellowship

  • 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…