Film Categories: Ecology

  • Critters Chorus, Cycle 1

    Whirring and flashing in the night sky. Wild foliage on a moist forest floor, rapidly passing by. Nervous encounters at a redwood tree, gurgling chatter with turkeys at dusk. Casually coiffed horses, unpredictable flying objects and flapping rotors. Speckled skin scrabbles, covered in lush ferns. Swirling fog, dripping haze, old man’s beard, light – diffracted. Sassy badgers, strings and figures. Critters Chorus, Cycle 1 is the first part of an ongoing project, developed while delving into unfamiliar habitats. Lead by questioning the so-called “species problem”, Truttmann investigates the (im)possibilities of taxonomic categorization of living organisms from an artistic point of…

  • Flowers #3 (Kissed by the sun)

    These motion picture photograms were initiated through a five hour plunge into the darkroom; remembering the Galician celebration of flowers on the road in Baiona, near Vigo in 2019, here too we made a floral carpet of photograms. –P.Hoffman A Procession of herbs “emerge in all their structures, colors and epidermis. The motion picture itself becomes a plant which delicately stretches petioles and petals.” – Séance #3-Sentir Comme une Plante, Muséum National d’Histoire naturelle, Paris.

  • Passengers

    In 2024 I decided to visit some places I had been to before, places near where I am in the present and places I’ve never been to in the past. As I travelled from here to there, filming this and that I was reminded once again that nothing stands still and nothing stays the same. One of the things that I always wondered about was the intention of the occupied places I would see and what determined the way in which they were expressed. Sometimes it seemed clear while at other times it didn’t appear clear at all. I was…

  • Precipice

    Moving images & Music: Kent Tate 4k Humans create narratives about themselves then make great effort to conform reality to that narrative. This wasn’t a threat to planetary survival 10,000 years ago when we were scattered in small bands worshiping local deities and relying on nearby gathered foodstuffs with only stone tools. It’s quite another thing when we are packed into mega-cities with nuclear weapons and ambiguous connectivity with relationships imbued in instruments that far exceed an individual’s capacity to fully comprehend or to reliably navigate our various systems. The earth spins around the sun at 30 km/sec. The habitable…

  • Trespass

    In September 2024 I went on a filming trip to southwest Saskatchewan and southeast Alberta. To get there I travelled the TransCanada Highway from my home in BC. On the way there and back I took some short stops to take a closer look at some places that appeared interesting. Often these places had restricted access or no public access at all and the longer I stopped somewhere that is not open to the public the greater the chance I would be told to leave. One such place is in the Rocky Mountains where I setup my camera outside their…

  • Symbiosis

    Occasionally I’m able to spend time in a place where I can observe how the natural world takes shape outside the anxious time frame of our hurried species. In this world relationships seem to have evolved to perpetuate balance over long periods of time as opposed to short cycles of calm interspersed with brief periods of chaos. Overruns and schedules don’t appear to exist there as they do in our manufactured world. Symbiosis is defined as a close, prolonged association between two or more different biological species. This relationship can be symbiotic (mutualistic), where both parties involved benefit from the…

  • La noirceur souterraine des racines

    Shot in Quebec (Canada), La noirceur souterraine des racines (The subterranean blackness of roots) is a 16 mm film triptych which uses several processes specific to analog cinema (hand processing, optical printing, photochemical alteration). The film seeks to show the sensory experience of the invisible life of stones, plants, and the nature that surrounds us.

  • Tarpaulins

    The point of departure for “Tarpaulins” was a colorful disturbance on the cityscape of Los Angeles: a home in the distance festooned with a giant striped tarp. These are termite fumigation tents and filmmaker Lisa Truttmann follows their story on a two-year long investigation as she hunts down the tents, the homes, the termites inside and their traces. As the film goes on, the termites soon become our allies, guiding us through Los Angeles’ neighborhoods on their own terms. Questions of life and death, profit and loss, home and un-home, macrocosm and microcosm are brought to the fore in pursuit…

  • Landmarks of Memory

    A tattoo ritual and hookah session memorializes a pre-war flower shop. After seeing its storefront in archival footage of the Lebanese Civil War, a first-generation daughter seeks information and connection to place. Scenes of 1976 Beirut are paired with today’s developed landscape, while roses are etched and coconut coals burn in a snowy diasporic setting.

  • Messengers

    A poetic exploration of three subterranean telescopes in remote regions of Canada, Japan, and Antarctica that reveal a new way of perceiving the universe from within. Underground, we are dreaming into the earth.