Film Categories: Ecology

  • Landing Sites

    There are places that we seek, and there are places that find us. One can never know for sure which comes first; the seeking or the finding. Often the unexpected moment occurs, the unforeseen discovery. Landing Sites: Truck on a house – Car drifting on a flooded plain – Signs flying over a lake – A super storm engulfs a building – Ghost train – Lightening strikes a plywood structure – Rail yard secured by a fire fighter – Electrical discharge in central city – Outskirts of prairie dog town. Landing Sites in order of appearance: House on a truck…

  • Prairie Grizzly’s Peneplain

    “Prairie Grizzly’s Peneplain” is a meditation on various natural and manufactured landscapes in southern Saskatchewan. This region is part of an ancient Precambrian seabed rebounding from the last Ice Age which once had a dynamic range of wildlife, plants, and wetlands supporting various ancient cultures that flourished here for millennia. Up until the late 1800‘s the Prairie Grizzly thrived on the Canadian Prairies. The bears that managed to migrate further west to the Rocky Mountains faced a difficult transition, although they have managed to survive in their new homes. Along with the plains buffalo, the have become a presence in…

  • Ruines

    Sur l’autoroute 15, juste à l’extérieur de Montréal, se dresse un monument à la Révolution tranquille : les écrans en décomposition du Ciné Parc Laval, ouvert en 1971, l’année où les ciné-parcs ont marqué l’histoire du Québec. En 1947, sous la pression de l’Église catholique, les ciné-parcs sont interdits au Québec. C’était la tentative de l’Église de réglementer le sexe en dehors de la sphère domestique. À l’origine un drive-in à 2 salles de cinéma, le Ciné Parc Laval est rapidement devenu 4 écrans en raison de sa popularité. Ce film utilise des segments de Frissons (1975) de David Cronenberg…

  • 75 Years

    The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki 75 years ago initiated The Cold War. 75 Years is a cinematic meditation on The Cold War and photography. 75 Years is comprised of surreal, evocative still photos put into motion and edited like cinematic footage. The images are often stunningly beautiful. Though not documentary, they feel like they were shot at ground zero of an annihilation. And they are sequenced to suggest such a narrative—from a Prologue to an Aftermath. All the images have some degree of motion blur, so they range from representational to abstract. At their most abstract, they look…

  • The Eyes of Summer

    In a small and remote hamlet in Southern Sri Lanka, a little girl develops a curious friendship with a spirit who lives in an abandoned house. This film was shot in my mother’s village in Southern Sri Lanka—shortly after the civil war in 2010. Collaboratively developed with members of my family there, a narrative was improvised around an investigation into my mother’s interactions with spirits in the community during her childhood. Landing somewhere between horror fiction and “spectral” ethnography, the film describes a population reeling from devastations of the past, where distinctions between the living and the dead are thinning.

  • Garden of Earthly Delights, The

    This film (related to “Mothlight”) is a collage composed entirely of montane zone vegetation. As the title suggests it is an homage to (but also argument with) Hieronymus Bosch. It pays tribute as well, and more naturally, to “The Tangled Garden” of J.E.H. MacDonald and the flower paintings of Emil Nolde.

  • sway

    A sequel to the pandemic-themed reflection “still”, “sway” explores the seductive – and destructive – pull of fear.

  • Fevered

    ‘Fevered’ is a meditation on the heated drama enacted by lakes and rivers as winter unravels. Piecing together 16mm footage and sound recordings, Peters re-imagines the pulsing of waterways as a metaphorical rhizome swelling outward in a feverish response to global warming.

  • Dam’d

    Using 16mm film altered in part by algae and zebra mussels, ‘Dam’d’ illuminates parallel behaviours between human and invasive species and their impact on waterways. The mutation of film footage acts as a metaphor for the erosion and evolution of the aquatic ecosystems it records.

  • Shifting Baseline

    Motion picture film decomposes in a bath of toxic cyanobacteria collected from a shore where children are playing. A child’s piano improvisation plays over the bacterial impressions in memory of a fleeting moment. ‘Shifting Baseline’ combines ecological and filmic processes to capture and animate an environment that is rapidly slipping away.