Film Categories: Ecology

  • Dead Horse Point

    “Dead Horse Point” is a film that expresses my feelings of ambivalence for the western genre, and America as a nation. It essentially deals with the notion of “the old west,” “the frontier,” the blurred line between historical fact and myth, the role of Hollywood in the historical process, the importance of celebrity in America, and finally the influence that the western landscape has had in defining the mythology of “the old west.”

  • tide goes in, the tide goes out, The

    A hand-processed, black-and-white ode to the secret world of moon jellyfish (Aurelia aurita). “The tide goes in, the tide goes out” revels in the material and chemical qualities of the film medium, with the fragility of the film mirroring that of the jellyfish. Made for 30 x 30: Newly Commissioned FIlms for Thirty Years of LIFT Selected screenings: Images Festival, 2012 (Toronto, ON); Kassel Documentary Film & Video Festival, 2012 (Germany); Jihlava International Documentary Festival, 2012 (Czech Republic); (S8) Mostra Cinema Periférico, 2016 (Spain)

  • when the smog-filled wind began to howl

    We know now that in the early years of the twenty-first century this world was being watched closely by intelligences greater than man. [adapted from Orson Welles’ adaptation of HG Wells’ War of the Worlds (Orson Welles And Mercury Theatre On The Air, Columbia Broadcasting System, 8:00 To 9:00 P.M., Sunday, October 30, 1938)]

  • Edge of Extinction

    “Gone the way of the whooping crane.” Once a symbol of certain extinction, today a sign of hope. The whooping crane is here depicted in a combination of rotoscope images, slides, photographs, line drawings, and multiple exposures.

  • Memory Worked By Mirrors

    A mirror in the filmmaker’s backyard reflects his childhood home. The black frame of the watermarked mirror becomes a mysterious portal, distorting brick, branch, and flesh into an amorphous hodgepodge. A self-portrait.

  • Christ Church – Saint James

    In the spring of 1998, Christ Church – Saint James, a historic black church in Toronto’s Little Italy, was destroyed by arson. All that remained were walls and a pit, and over subsequent years, the site was overtaken with graffiti. This film has taken on the layered form of the site itself: the space and its surfaces becoming tangled and multiple, the grid of a stone-filled window giving geometric form to simultaneously occurring images of concrete, nature, waste, paint, and sky. Music by John Butcher.

  • Manor Road

    Trains travel to and from a fixed point in space beneath a variable coloured horizon.

  • on the day it started there wasn’t a cloud in sight

    it was about 10 minutes to five o’clock when it descended upon the city.

  • Akin

    “Akin” marks the first creative collaboration between Toronto-based artist Chase Joynt (Everyday to Stay) and NYC-based filmmaker Brooke Sebold (Red Without Blue). With haunting suburban visuals backed by the rich sounds of Toronto based-band Ohbijou, “Akin” powerfully engages in a relationship between an Orthodox Jewish mother and her transgender son as they navigate silent secrets of a shared past. Hauntingly beautiful. Rarely have I watched a film that is such a perfect union of parsimony and punch. It left me breathless. – Michelle Stone Perfectly timed and sequenced, “Akin” is so resolutely personal in it’s detailing. Joynt points to a…

  • her silent life

    A version of family. From mother, grandmother, great-grandmother to me, stories flow through our matrilineal heritage to explore the remarkable life of my Inuk great-grandmother.