Film Categories: Diaspora

  • 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…

  • Canada Park

    I walk on snow to fall unto the desert. I find myself on unceded indigenous territory in so called Canada, an exile unable to return to Palestine. I trespass the colonial border as a digital spectre floating through Ayalon-Canada Park, transplanted over three Palestinian villages razed by the Israeli Occupation Forces in 1967. Canada Park is an experimental video poem exploring the politics of dis/appearance of Palestine as narrativized, mapped and imaged in Google Streetview and early 20th century colonial landscape photography of the ‘Holy Land’, namely at the site of the village of Imwas which is theologically conflated with…

  • Sea, carry my dream / Mer, emporte mon Rêve

    Toward the land, toward the sea. Where can a boy be safe? The universal story of fear and hope for boat people seen through young eyes. The little red fish shows him a mysterious world full of wonder and danger under the sea that his fragile boat is escaping on.

  • 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…

  • 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.

  • Stone Time Touch

    “Stone Time Touch”, starring and narrated by Arsinée Khanjian, is a documentary essay which builds a layered and elusive image of Armenian identity. It is an extended meditation on the traces of Armenia as they are lived out in the homeland of imagination, in the real Armenia of today, in the Diaspora, beyond Genocide. “Award-winning Armenian-Canadian experimental filmmaker Gariné Torossian weaves together a poetic collage of memory, loss and expectation in this essay documentary of a real and imagined Armenia. Interwoven with a young woman’s journey to her homeland are the photographs and reflections of Arsinée Khanjian. As Khanjian recounts…

  • Away

    A new immigrant applies for a visa and endures the long and demanding wait for approval or denial. An epistolary poetic film that navigates the inner thoughts of an applicant’s last half of a two-year process for a residency visa in Canada. This long and tumultuous journey that for many can take at least 24 months from the application date demands a high level of resilience as it imposes dramatic waves of anxiety and loneliness. Away turns a sharp light into one of the consequences of the current process we have for economic immigration in Canada, a country with immigration…

  • One Day

    “One Day” is an experimental film that delves into the depth of a single photograph. Captured by the artist during her initial exploration of film photography in Toronto, this snapshot becomes the centerpiece of an experimental piece. The passage of six years before its development mirrors the artist’s personal journey- a journey that leads her to choose Toronto as her permanent abode after traversing Iran, Montreal, and Europe. Relocating with her family in 2009, the city’s embrace as a second home poses a poignant challenge. The haunting presence of immigrant status looms large, leaving an indelible mark on the artist’s…

  • WE DON’T TALK LIKE WE USED TO

    “Shot between Hong Kong, Japan, and the US, this short is Joshua Gen Solondz’s most ambitious work to date, a portrait of the home and the world that is dense, textured, creepy, anxious, noisy, silly, and confounding, but always tender.”-TIFF “We Don’t Talk Like We Used To” continues Joshua Gen Solondz’s loose series of addled diary films with a film that is part travelogue, part affective almanac, and part cinematic noise show. With stops in Hong Kong, New Hampshire, Japan, and Brooklyn, the film alloys obscured faces, oozing on-screen text, throbbing abstractions, solarized superimpositions, and the occasional dad joke into…

  • Currents / Perpendicolare Avanti

    Currents / Perpendicolare Avanti is a camera-less, hand-made, 16mm film collage, based on the artist’s autobiographical experience as an immigrant. In three movements, the film explores the dynamics of inhabiting the in-between space of moving between multiple countries and their temporalities, through visual and sound abstraction, interlacing and recycling pre-existing film materials and, using fragments from anonymous orphan films. Utilizing these so-called scraps, Currents is a film of extensive remediation, treated by hand through the use of the emulsion lifting technique, thereby re-imagining, re-constructing, and de-constructing the liminality of immigrant life. The re-writing of the self in Currents is produced…