Film Categories: Ecology

  • Balinese Rebar

    Birds in flight break through rusted clouds and translucent buildings. Rebar at a construction site seems to snake through sunlit puddles.

  • The Order of Ideas at the Leslie Street Spit

    On the paths that cut through Toronto’s Tommy Thompson Park, at the foot of Leslie Street, an assortment of terrains collide: thicket, pebbled shorelines, muddy vistas, and fertile earth with beds of wildflowers. A giant duck crosses the horizon. A radio transmission of Shooby Taylor, the human horn, travels with us.

  • Selected Works by the Loop Collective: Volume 1

    A selection of films produced between 2005-2011 by members of The Loop Collective, a Toronto-based group of independent filmmakers, musicians, dancers and multimedia artists who strive to connect cinema to related interdisciplinary art forms. 1. fugitive l(i)ght 2. c: won eyed jail 3.Thaw 4. Parícutin 5.Quanta 6. Shapes Eat Shapes 7. Levitas 8. Spiders in Eden 9. The Changing Light 10. Christ Church – Saint James 11. Thought Form 12. Morning 13. Many Glimpses 14. Movement / Stasis (documentation)

  • Breathtaking

    Breathtaking takes on the asbestos industry through a moving and personal investigation into Kathleen’s father’s death from an asbestos-related disease and the current present-day use of asbestos in Canada and internationally. Valued since the beginning of time and commercially mined since the Industrial Revolution, asbestos was coined the ‘magic mineral’ for its extraordinary capacity to protect against fire, and was used in everything from brake pads to oven mitts. Discovered to be carcinogenic, the use of asbestos was banned in many countries and the use of it limited in others. Canada, along with Russia and several other countries, still mines…

  • Sous le soleil (Under the Sun)

    In the heat of summer solar panel reflections blend with butterflies on flowers and a little bird eating the mulberries.

  • Dispatches From The Future

    A grieving woman who spends too much time in her car starts to think that it might be haunted.

  • Elephant Dreams

    Five storytellers take off from a physical characteristic of the elephant, much like the fable of the blind men, where each constructs a different whole from a fragment. Elephant-related images are then inserted into their stories, subjectively and associatively. “Elephant Dreams” is essentially about the action of memory and the imagination at work. Everyone makes his or her own story. “Davis plays with the power of suggestion and our knowledge of filmic language to undermine a simple relationship with story and image, and to create a collage of simple pieces that add up to a complex and allusive whole. This…

  • Pepper’s Ghost

    How we may see in a Chamber things that are not! Here, mutations of light, through fabric, glass, and colored gel, make bodies and objects transparent. Let there be a chamber wherein no other light comes but by the door or window. Let pictures be set over against this window. For what is without will seem to be within, and what is behind the spectator’s back, he will think to be in the middle of the room, as far from the glass inward as they stand from it outwardly. Clearly and certainly, he will think he sees nothing but truth.

  • Spirits In Season

    Lily Dale is a spiritualist community in Chautauqua County, New York. Pilgrims and tourists swarm the hamlet in summer, but in the fall, Lily Dale becomes a more intimate setting for spectral communions. This film explores the town’s Leolyn Woods, pet cemetery, Inspiration Stump, and Fairy Trail. Music by Nate Wooley.

  • Axis

    Axis is an experimental film made through entirely photomechanical and photochemical means. The film fits into the experimental sub-genre of “optical printer film.” Some practitioners who have inspired me include Jordan Belson, John Whitney, David Rimmer, Pat O’Neill, Al Razutis, Gary Popovich, Bruce Elder and Norman McLaren. Axis takes as its subject matter the mundane, faceless urban landscape with its gleaming towers and factories. The workaday humdrum… drones to the hive. So I take to the streets, with my homemade Bolex robot, affectionately known as “BOLBOT.” It is a time-lapse motion control machine capable of smoothly spinning through X-Y-Z axes…