Film Categories: Ecology

  • Tournesols, Les

    The film presents a field of sunflowers. The focus is adjusted frame-by-frame in succession according to a series of patterns on particular plants situated in different parts of the field. The diverse configurations placed on separate frames of the filmstrip appear, when projected successively, simultaneously on the screen. Thus, filmed one after another at different focal lengths, the sunflowers combine during projection to form one spatio-temporal image.

  • Black Earth

    A film-essay on the earth’s body, “Black Earth” follows a woman’s journey through time and space. The film’s images and utterances and sounds poetically resonate a world as woman, a woman suffering the fate of humanity. “Black Earth” was filmed on location in India.

  • Who’ll Stop the Rain

    “Who’ll Stop the Rain” is a short but provocative animated film about the acid rain that falls in Canadian forests and on Canadian wildlife. The film is not intended to inform viewers of scientific facts. Its only goal is to motivate them to help stop the rain and can be used to generate discussions concerning the acid rain problem.

  • Bouquets 1-10

    “Bouquets 1-10” consists of ten one-minute films covering a variety of subjects. The procedure entails using the film strip as a canvas with the freedom to film frames on any part of the strip in any order, running the film through the camera as many times as needed. Each bouquet of flowers is also a bouquet of frames, mingling the plants to be found in a given place with activities that happen to be there at the time. Bouquet 1: The Mount Ventoux, from top to bottom over a distance of twenty miles: yellow poppies and mountain flowers mix with…

  • Sea of Souls

    This film is about a personal shamanic journey. This is also a haunting visual poem. Two souls in one world, one breath, one life, one realm. The underwater realm becomes the environment where this merging of souls takes place. The dance emulates the movement of water. Dancer Penny Couchie moves like the ocean. She becomes the ocean and the life within it. According to the Haida legend, the undersea realm is where human souls resort after death. Using this statement as a concept, exploration of the human soul is investigated. We will be bridged together, into one living being, yet…

  • Brief Life, A

    “A Brief Life” is a poetic homage to a farmer and the cows he raises. Shot over the course of a year on a small farm in rural Ontario, it follows the same cow through the cycle of the seasons from hours after its birth right on through until it is sold for meat. It is a film concerned with documenting an entire process from beginning to end and allowing the viewer to watch it unfold. “A Brief Life” is not an anti-meat film. It comes out of the concern that by living in an urban environment we can become…

  • Budworks

    Aerial insecticide spraying of forests is the most ignored environmental problem in North America today. In Canada, every province east of Saskatchewan, with the exception of Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island, sprays annually to control the spruce budworm. New Brunswick forests have been sprayed since 1952, longer than anywhere else in the world. “Budworks” investigates the controversy surrounding the spraying and goes directly to the people who are involved.

  • I Am Always Connected

    “I Am Always Connected” is about inseparable connections, like those between light and shadow, the mind and the body, the rational and the instinctual. The film is a new construction from footage originally made for a 1984 installation piece for the Lumen Travo, a gallery in Amsterdam. The original Super 8 film was projected hundreds of times in a loop. “I Am Always Connected” was filmed on a small country road near Nijmegen, The Netherlands. I painted the canvas backdrop based on photographs taken at the location. I recently returned to the location and found that all the trees had…

  • Four Corners

    “Four Corners” was shot in the U.S. in the Navajo Reservation. “Without using words or sensational imagery, this film makes a powerful statement in communicating the horror of environmental pollution” (Jury, 30th Tampere International Short Film Festival).

  • Song of the Firefly

    “Song of the Firefly” is a visual poem which utilizes the camera-less photogram technique that was introduced in Pruska-Oldenhof’s 2001 film “Light Magic.” “Song of the Firefly” transports the viewer to an open field on a warm summer night, where the luminous dance of the fireflies can be experienced. The exhuberant display of light, as each flash illuminates different portions of the field, reveals fragments of the space in which we are contained, leaving us always waiting in anticipation to see more.