Film Categories: environment

  • Reflections (Lipskis)

    Multi-layered imagery of natural forms and textures. Synthesizer music by Ron Smulevici.

  • Revival

    A vivid cinema-verité documentary on street-corner revivalism in Toronto, this film probes the compulsions of self-appointed voices in the wilderness. Fast-paced, beautifully edited.

  • river

    The Saugeen River was named Sauking, “where it all flows out,” by the Ojibwa in the early 1800s. It runs into Lake Huron, in central Ontario. The place where I know it is twenty miles south of Owen Sound, near Williamsford, where I spent lots of time in my youth exploring. Over the past twelve years I’ve returned there to film, and collected these moments in a fifteen-minute meditation called simply, “river.” In 1997, I arrived with a wind-up 16mm Bolex and one roll of 16mm colour film; in 1981 with a half inch, reel-to-reel black-and-white video portapak; in 1984,…

  • Road Ended at the Beach, The

    In making this film I collected images and sound over six years of travel (not continuous) through Canada. Keeping daily both filmic and written records, I focused on people and places, my relationships to them, and the changes that occurred between each visit. I would collect these images freely: later to examine and make meaning of during the editing process. In this film I started to consciously pursue the relationship between a formal chronicle of events and my memory of those events. (PH) “The film is a series of ‘telling’ incidents in which events, which fall short of expectations, are…

  • Sang Song

    From atop a Jakartan ferris wheel, a song in light.

  • Bark Rind

    “Bark Rind” is a single-concept film that creates a unique audio-visual cinematic experience. Presented over the course of the work are gyrating, close-up images of flowers, bark, grass and leaves, accompanied by the shrill of insects on the soundtrack. The entire film was shot in single frame, each frame involving multiple exposures of the same object in complex combinations of close-up, medium shot and long shot, all realized in-camera.

  • Scars

    “Scars” deals with the subject of ecology in an abstract and highly innovative manner. Rather than make a direct statement about the effects of urbanization on the natural landscape, Winkler forms his ideas through a poetic montage of visual and auditory imagery.

  • Scream of the Butterfly

    In vivid colour, the metamorphosis from larva to butterfly to collector’s jar. The beauty of the butterfly bursts from the cocoon as an atom bomb, only to be netted and bottled. The living beauty can only become illusory when bottled.

  • Serenity

    A visual symphony in which the striking notes include: hoodoo formations created by eons of erosion that give a strong sense of decay, by Japanese gardens whose layouts provide a structure and acts as a tool for quiet contemplation, and by birds which act as a symbol of man’s soaring spirit and other-worldliness. Music and soundtrack by Darryl Miller.

  • Solar Frontier, The

    A film about solar-heated houses in the snowbelt – their cost, performance, and technology – as told by the architects and people who live in them. The film demonstrates that solar energy is a feasible alternative now, not next year or in the next century.