Film Categories: (De)colonization

  • Queer Camp Trilogy

    The Queer Camp Trilogy is a series of experimental films exploring the hidden dimensions of queer Japanese American wartime history. This trilogy, made up of Looking For Jiro (2011), Warning Shot (2016), and On the Line (2018), was inspired by first-generation Japanese Americans who were incarcerated by the US government during World War II. These subjects left subtle yet discernible traces of same-sex intimacy or gender nonconformity in the archive, despite the enormous pressure put upon Japanese Americans to accept their imprisonment quietly, prove their patriotic loyalty, and smile for Ansel Adams during their unlawful imprisonment. I approached their enigmatic…

  • Misadventures of Pussy Boy Trilogy

    “Misadventures of Pussy Boy” is trilogy of short videos subtitled “First Love”, “Sick” and “First Period”, each video’s running time is approximately 6 minutes, all videos are animated in a fashion that is very much “do-it-yourself” aesthetic, as told from the point of view of a transgendered youth in rural Cape Breton. Each video was animated by hand, the backgrounds were created like theatre back drops, with the characters hand painted and cut out, performing each scene in front of the matching background for the scene. Camera work involved shooting each shot for 3-5 seconds and then manipulating the characters…

  • First Love

    “First Love” is the first video in the “Misadventures of Pussy Boy” trilogy, made in 2002, our outcast 2Spirit youth Alick is seduced by femme Lesbian siren Kay with token resistance. Kay is also an outcast because of her Metis status, this shared outsider status draws them together in order to survive the tyranny of high school bullies against their queer romantic attraction.

  • Sick

    “Sick” is the second video in the “Misadventures of Pussy Boy” trans trilogy, produced in 2003. Alick is verbally and physically queer bashed at school, Kay shares with our anti-hero the power of reclaiming hurtful words like “sick”. Our protagonists find safety, comfort and acceptance in each other’s arms.

  • First Period

    “First Period”, the third video in the “Misadventures of Pussy Boy” trilogy, the title is a double entendre for the first period of school and Alick’s first menstrual cycle, a shocking event that sends our intersexed youth into an emotional tailspin. Alick is worried about how Kay will react, will she have anything to do with this “?”. Their burgeoning secret relationship is threatened by Kay’s friendship with Ray, the high school bad boy. Alick also relates how he acquired the name “pussy boy”. Alick learns his lessons well from his first love Kay and turns a bully’s taunt into…

  • Trans Cabaret

    “Trans Cabaret” is half hour long “edutainment” cabaret of sketches about “all things trans”, performed by members of the trans community for the purposes of bringing “translightenment to the masses”. The video also goes behind the scenes to show the performers coping with being homeless, dealing with transphobia in the shelter system, telling parents about being trans and dealing with abusive partners. During the cabaret the performers rehearse tongue-in-cheek sketches by “characters” in the cabaret. The video demonstrates through the cabaret an open attitude about the basics of gender reassignment surgery, gender identities and orientations, the myths and realities of…

  • Controller

    A fly compresses time and captures itself on video by triggering a motion-activated surveillance webcam.

  • Extractions

    A personal film about Canada’s extraction industry and its detrimental effects on the land and Indigenous peoples. This film parallels resource extraction with the booming child apprehension Industry currently operating in Canada which is responsible for putting more Indigenous children into foster care than were in Residential Schools. As the filmmaker reviews his life and how these Industries have affected him, he also reflects on having his own eggs retrieved and frozen to make an Indigenous baby.

  • Island Story

    “I know nothing about the filmmaker, but with a short film as odd and strangely poignant as this one, the mystery makes it all the better. The blindingly and like a Martian horizon, the sun plays with the viewer’s stability. A narrator gives the account of a strange tale of a couple on a transformative journey into a world of paradise with no language. Animalistic gesticulations and instinctive expression emanate from the body until both of them grow apart and then into other versions of themselves, never to be the same again. A grainy vintage-like feel permeates the alien world…

  • (tourism studies)

    Sometimes it’s not until the project is finished that I begin to know what the project is about. I’d been sifting through this footage: travel movies, home movies, fragments from projects that never became more than that. It was the summer of 2018 that I began assembling these parts, working intuitively, letting the process guide me and I began to realize that I’d made a Rorschach test for myself, a formalist self-portrait of my Belgian-Japanese-American-Jew heritage and a personal emotional journey following my mother’s passing, my father’s remarriage, and Emma having my child. January 2019 while shooting in Hong Kong,…