Film Categories: environment

  • But Some Are Brave

    “But Some Are Brave” is an innovative, multi-layered animated film project. This short poetic chronicle uses an oil paint-on-glass animation technique. It introduces iconic characters and historic events in a flurry of emotional and psychological rhythms. Using the metaphor and symbolic structural device of weaving, “But Some Are Brave” takes us through this visual poem like a spindle flying through layers of thread – telling us something of the cultural and political histories of communities under attack. Awards: Audience Award for Best Film, TAIS Animation Showcase, Toronto, 2009; Prix du publique for Best Animated Film, Cineffable Festival, Paris, 2009

  • Simultaneous Contrast

    The striped pattern of the municipal bus shelters in San Francisco becomes a fixed foreground behind which the city passes. Spatial oscillations provide a constantly permutating play of figure, ground and space, imaging the possibility of being two places at once.

  • Fore-and-Aft

    “Fore-and-Aft” was created by the Bay of Fundy in Nova Scotia, Canada – site of the highest tides in the world. Images of the tides are married with celluloid that was buried in the sea bed, and dragged through the ocean behind a boat. Physically exposing film to the motion and light of the sea recorded tactile evidence of the repetition and changes wrought by tide cycles.

  • Last Feast, The

    “The Last Feast” tells the story of Irving, a mindless drone, who steals from the graves of the dead to fulfill his greedy masters’ desire. It is a dark tale of destruction and wasted resources in a decadent society. “The Last Feast“ combines stop-motion, classical and computer-generated animation with live-action puppetry.

  • Surface Tension

    snow, water, christmas lights, and shopping malls created for the afcoop Super 8 Xmas screening

  • Maternal Record Not Fully Recorded, A

    super 8 home movie footage captures memories not otherwise remembered while other memories never materialize in the tangible home photo archives

  • Sparklene

    This is a story of the transformative effects of sparking, speculative frenzy. It questions whether embodied contact with objects and living creatures can occur outside fixed clichés of perception so that eyes can have multi-sensory effects.

  • New Atlantis

    Landscape and drive-thrus transformed by real estate speculation are reanimated with magical thinking and an embodied language written in breath on a windshield. “A bird’s mind can hold only one sample. How to come here and how to return. This loop has been corrupted by blooming rot. The cat knows the curse to reset it.”

  • Uphill Descent, The

    A visual meditation on the natural cycle that leads the viewer through an underworld landscape and culminates in a violent, colorful rebirth.

  • All Fall Down

    “All Fall Down” is an experimental documentary that takes as its starting point a nineteenth century farmhouse in Southern Ontario, Canada, and asks the question “what has been here before?” The film weaves together a complex temporal structure that juxtaposes the lives of two figures, one historical (Nahneebahweequa: a nineteenth century aboriginal woman and land rights activist) and the other contemporary (an ex-pat drifter and father of the filmmaker’s step-daughter) across two hundred years. “All Fall Down” explores these characters through a variety of archival materials: diaries, landscape paintings, photographs, heritage films, poems, phone messages, maps, historical reenactments, songs) that…