Film Categories: Earth

  • Toraanisqatsi

    Leif Harmsen’s remake of Godrey Reggio’s classic independent film “Koyaanisqatsi” was shot on Super 8 film entirely on location in Toronto by invitation to the Splice This! 2005 Super 8 Film Festival. Bob Wiseman wrote and performed the evocative instrumental soundtrack. “Toraanisqatsi” is an environmental thriller set in the Toronto of the 21st century, a city taken over by cars, fast food, electronic billboards, jetliners, industry and pollution. It is seen through the terrified eyes of a living breathing human. All transportation for this film was done by bicycle or foot.

  • fall storm (california 2003)

    Sitting in a quiet room; listening to a storm out the window.

  • Crystals

    A cinematic tribute to William Bentley, a Vermont dairy farmer who pioneered the “art” of snowflake photography for forty-six winters (1885-1931), proving that no two of his 5381 specimens were identical. This film contains about 1500 examples (fewer than the average snowball), showing the incredible variation of design in nature, while producing the effect of an “organic” hexagonal mandala in a state of continual metamorphosis.

  • Lake Ontario (in my head)

    A meditative look at a mutable and hypnotic horizon. Grainy Super 8 imagery, optically printed 16mm footage and an atmospheric soundtrack evoke the stillness of mind reached when standing before expansive sky and water. Filmed at Gibraltar Point Centre for the Arts, Lake Ontario (in my head) was created as part of LIFT’s 25th anniversary Film is Dead… Long Live Film! commissioning project.

  • Gigantic

    Through the voice of a travelling narrator, we are shown the world through the eyes of a young and seemingly mad vagabond who speaks of his adventures, dreams, and experiences throughout Toronto, New York, and eventually Argentina.

  • Dying for the Pleasure

    “Dying for the Pleasure” is the result of a poem-as-script strategy. It is a darkly humorous, kaleidoscopic trip down Memory Lane, the audience witness to a woman’s anxiety surrounding the loss of our humanity after we “crawl inside,” to become enveloped, shielded, and cut off from others by a body of steel. Director: Katrin Bowen Writer, Producer: Heather Haley

  • Shelter, The

    After a tragic event that destroyed human civilization, two survivors wander around a destroyed building. The younger one, full of hope, thinks he can arrange the situation by finding other possible survivors, while the elder waits for his hour to come by making art with the debris of the late Civilization.

  • Kolam (Pool)

    “‘Pool’ is a touching portrait of a community attempting to rebuild and heal itself following the devastating 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami that shocked the world. The titular swimming pool is a temporary makeshift basin created to help the children of Aceh, Indonesia, face their fear of water and learn to swim again, despite the losses their community suffered when the sea came crashing in. Chong Chan Fui observes their progress with affection and a poet’s eye.” – Andrea Picard, Toronto International Film Festival In Indonesian, Acehnese and English with English subtitles. Awards: Winner of the Award for Best Canadian Short,…

  • Regard

    This short experimental film mirrors 21st century issues of social deconstruction in everday urban life. Produced in Toronto, during that summer of the London UK transit bombings, it echoes calls for solutions to a threatened, “Homeland” and the notion of security itself. “Regard” plays with impressions of cognizance, consciousness, witnessing, and surveillance in the metroplis, where the passage of human beings through industrialized urban space/time is obversed. Connotations of danger lurk in trains, buses, streetcars, subway/communter trains, and automobile traffic, while bicycles and pedestrains weave sinous paths through the city. A well-intentioned fabric of vulnerability emerges, its irony punctuated by…

  • Moose Jaw: There’s a Future in Our Past (DVD Release)

    Available for purchase in the CFMDC Shop: https://www.cfmdc.org/shop. “Appropriate to a context of Canadian de-confederation, MOOSE JAW is at once a statement of the filmmaker’s own maturation; a regionalist dirge on the fatality of economic dependency; an excavation of our ever-vanishing collective past; and the ironic deconstruction of all the above.” – Michael Dorland, Art Gallery of Ontario Moose Jaw was a frontier boom-town flourishing on the Canadian Pacific rail line forging Canada as a “Dominion” in the late 1800s. But as rail gave way to the jet age, Moose Jaw began to decline. Now, museums dot the landscape (along…