Film Categories: Ecology

  • The European Rooms

    An unhurried camera glides by bedrooms, drawing rooms, dining rooms, and entrance halls filled with finely crafted furniture and carefully selected objets. While displaying a familiar world of privilege, class, and prestige, these well-appointed rooms appear in the film as inescapably uncanny and oneiric. A slow unraveling of cinematic, sonic and architectural space played out in real time, The European Rooms is as confounding as it is elucidatory.

  • In the Hollow

    In May 1988, girlfriends Claudia Brenner and Rebecca Wight were attacked while hiking the Appalachian Trail by a ‘mountain man’ named Stephen Roy Carr. IN THE HOLLOW tells the story of the shooting, Wight’s death, and Brenner’s desperate survival (and later transformation into an advocate for hate crime legislation in the U.S.) as she returns to the trail for the first time since the shooting.  The film combines documentary and narrative film elements, using the actual locations on the trail and dramatizations written by Claudia Brenner and director/screenwriter Austin Bunn based on her testimony. The film follows Brenner as she…

  • Morning Light

    An experimental documentary following the narrative of George Griffiths and his son, Blair, in the early 1980s. The film is a triptych made up of three unique short films, each roughly corresponding to a section of a book written by George’s widow, Margaret, which details the very same narrative.

  • Apart

    An atmospheric meditation marries fluid visuals and views of the world through tracks of raindrops on glass with a powerful yet subtle sound design to created a cinematic poem on  rain and passing. The scenes captured draw a haunting and tenuous connection to the world

  • Die Haut der Musik (Music’s Skin)

    It is a very thin skin that covers the difference between sound and music. Between external noise and interpretation. It is this skin that separates the objective from the subjective, the natural from the artificial, the real from its representation.

  • Occidente

    A film-poem of an ecology of sings that speak of a colonial history repeating itself. Subalterns become masters, antiques become reproducible dinner sets, exotic birds become luxury currency, exploration becomes extreme-sport-tourism, monuments become geo-data. A spherical voyage eastwards and westwards marking cycles of expansion in a struggle to find one’s place, one’s sitting around a table. “An ecology of signs lurking amid seductive 16mm travel footage echoes with post-colonial reverberations in Ana Vaz’s deceptively corrosive, award-winning Occidente. – ANDRÉA PICARD (TIFF, Wavelengths)

  • Imaginary City

    3D animations are typically used by architects to make their designs more vivid. Often a wonderful world is drawn, which seems to be almost perfect. Colossal structures, skyscrapers or apartment buildings,mostly built of ferroconcrete, appearing in the most dazzling colors. The building boom seems to have no limits. But one problem is looming already : The sand needed for the production of concrete runs short. Most natural, easily accessible sand deposits have been exploited, this makes the industry turning to the sand on the sea floor. The results are sinking islands, disappearing beaches and the marine ecosystem is severely damaged.…

  • Appropriated, The

    THE APPROPRIATED was shot in several mega shopping malls with a hidden camera during the annual pre-Christmas crush. An ongoing thread in Dudar’s films is patterned movement, sometimes choreographed, but in this case found and manipulated in post-production. A myriad of editing techniques reveal shamanistic-like rituals in the everyday actions and behaviors of the shoppers. First unnoticed, small gestures are revealed and turned into mystic hand signals. Sometimes the shoppers cross into mysterious dimensions, deftly undermining our comprehension of spacetime. Abetted by the editing, a preponderance of reflective glass throughout challenges our perception of what is real, and what is…

  • Gulls At Gibraltar

    Seagulls hover and dip on the rocky coastline of Gibraltar Point on Toronto Island. Tilting and multiple horizons camouflage the birds, splintering and gathering the lone gull to the flock.

  • A Film, Reclaimed

    Produced with the support of Anna Sanders and École d’Arts Politiques (SPEAP) Paris. The ecologic crisis is a political, economic and social crisis. It is also cinematographic, as cinema coincides historically and in a critical and descriptive way with the development of the Anthropocene. A Film, Reclaimed is a conversation, an essay that reads the terrestrial crisis under the influence and with the help of the beautiful and terrible films which have accompanied it.