Film Categories: environment

  • 24.24.24

    24.24.24. is a view of a day in concurrent time. All of the day’s twenty-four hours are presented at once. In the minutia of time, banal events unfold and are made extraordinary through the camera’s gaze. People go to work and to school, time is stretched and skewed, the act of taking a walk or watering a lawn develops a magical quality. Light gains character, shadow reshapes objects, and time becomes palpable. Take a look.

  • Gibraltar Point (transformed)

    Erratic flashes of light spark across a flickering expanse of Lake Ontario. The image itself can’t be contained as light and debris spill outside the frame. The random alchemy of hand-processing techniques creates a landscape that transcends the observable, edging into the sublime. The ninth work in an ongoing series of poetic landscape films. “Gibraltar Point (transformed)” was created during a residency at Artscape Gibraltar Point on Toronto Island. Shot on black and white 16mm film, hand-processed, then transferred digitally with an ambient sound design by Michelle Irving. Selected screenings: Festival International du Film sur l’Art (Montreal, QC, 2017); Antimatter…

  • Burning Mountains That Spew Flame (Montañas ardientes que vomitan fuego)

    The interior of the earth became a refuge from the threat that moved closer and closer to the island. The volcanic tubes served as communication vessels between time and space. This was where they experimented their resistance.

  • One Hundred Attempts to Make a Film About Depression

    Four years ago I began working on what was supposed to be a documentary about living with depression. In the end, if there is anything harder than having a conversation about depression, it is making a film about it. After numerous shoots, interviews, restarts, and stages of abandonment, I created this piece. The film is an attempt at translating the emotional state of depression, as I experience it. Filmed almost entirely on the Phantom slow motion camera at 1500 frames per second, 100 Attempts To Make a Film About Depression represents an ongoing struggle to be open about coping with…

  • A Celebration of Darkness

    A woman with a tortured past is triggered to take an unexpected walk down memory lane, she finds herself face-to- face with her inner child. Giving her a chance to make peace with her past. Does she find a way to celebrate darkness or does she become engulfed forever by it? In 2015, Jaene turned 40. This lead her to become introspective about her unusual life history. From a childhood of severe abuse, neglect, psychiatric institutionalization and being in care, she grew to become a street involved sex worker by 20. She met Elder, Isaac Day from Serpent River First…

  • Somnium Lapidum (Dream Stones)

    This stop-motion 16mm film offers an audiovisual meditation on the material animation of stones. The concept is inspired by Camillo Leonardi’s “Speculum Lapidum”, published in 1533, which describes the magical healing virtues of a variety of stones, categorized by colour. The character-based animated vignettes are inspired by the woodcuts in “De Hortus Sanitatis”, a natural history encyclopedia published in 1485, which details various methods of harnessing the power of gems. It was believed at the time that a given gem’s powers could be absorbed through focused viewing. Proposing an analogy between this belief and attraction to cinema, this film offers…

  • The Promise

    Set in an open field, the two men dance, jumping from reality to dream, as they follow a path, a metaphor for structure in their pursuits, giving meaning to their struggles.

  • Watching the Detectives

    Immediately after the Boston Marathon bombing in April 2013, amateur detectives took to the internet chat rooms to try and find the culprits. Users on reddit, 4chan and other gathering spots poured over photographs uploaded to the sites, looking for any detail that might point to the guilt of potential suspects. Using texts and jpegs culled from these investigations, “Watching the Detectives” narrates the process of crowd-sourcing culpability. “Chris Kennedy’s latest offering is…a half-hour meta-doc about the online sleuthing surrounding the bombing of the Boston Marathon in 2013. Imagine ‘Patriot’s Day’ without Mark Wahlberg leading the charge. Instead, a steadfast…

  • DataMine

    “DataMine” is a stop-motion indictment of surveillance society; laboriously animated by hand with light painting to create surreal imagery without the use of computer generated images. Society embraces an ever-increasing connection to technology, creating digital communities that distract us from our real world existence. As our lives exist more and more in the digital realm, they are catalogued and stored for future mining by corporations and governments. This activity of data mining raises many questions regarding the future of activism and creativity – that which makes us human. In the intricate world of “DataMine,” the oblivious masses are catalogued and…

  • ôtênaw

    “ôtênaw” is a film documenting the oral storytelling of Dwayne Donald, an educator from Treaty 6, Edmonton Canada. Drawing from nêhiyawak philosophies, he speaks about the multilayered histories of Indigenous peoples’ presence both within and around amiskwacîwâskahikan, or what has come to be known as the city of Edmonton.