Film Categories: environment

  • Untitled #1 (sun vision)

    There were two initial impulses for the film: Turner’s almost-not-there paintings of light (whence the bracketed title ”sun vision”) and the swirling, spirit-filled paintings of Emily Carr. Sun-light-film- Untitled #1 is a film of liminal thresholds, borders, amorphous states – sky, clouds, fog, lake, snow. A film in motion – camera gestures and emulsion activity. People and seasons pass in the daily repetitive cycles- repetitions and reprises and beginnings again – sameness amidst the fleeting. Blurring, merging, dissolving boundaries,- the world as it is forming and disappearing…Not nothing, everything. “Everlasting and powerful is the theatre of life, without substance, but…

  • Extractions

    A personal film about Canada’s extraction industry and its detrimental effects on the land and Indigenous peoples. This film parallels resource extraction with the booming child apprehension Industry currently operating in Canada which is responsible for putting more Indigenous children into foster care than were in Residential Schools. As the filmmaker reviews his life and how these Industries have affected him, he also reflects on having his own eggs retrieved and frozen to make an Indigenous baby.

  • The Island

    A garden between Oakland and Berkley where its inhabitants, marginalized by gentrification, plant fruit trees and flowers to pay homage to their loved ones who died in battles against poverty. This is a space of love and freedom cared by Brian for the last 25 years. The island resists, as a living legacy of the Black Panthers who were the first to organize the neighbourhood.

  • Quimsacocha

    For the downstream communities of the high mountains of Quimsacocha, water is sacred. So when the giant Canadian company set their eyes to mine their land for gold and copper, 30-year-old Bolivar and 73-year-old Isaura were not happy. Isaura and Bolivar rely on water for their livelihood. Isaura owns four cows and Bolivar is in charge of the community’s water system. For them, water is life, and mining will jeopardize the future of their communities. Quimsacocha takes an honest look at these indigenous communities, their cultural traditions, and their lives in this picturesque landscape of the Western Andes Mountains in…

  • Vanilla

    Vanilla takes you through the everyday ordinary life of a disabled senior citizen living in Ottawa, Canada. It is a portrait documenting aging and the loneliness of those suffering in silence. The black and white film was shot on 16mm Bolex film camera using a KODAK 7222 Double-X Negative film. Processed by Niagara Film Lab (Toronto). Created as part of Independent Filmmakers Co-operative of Ottawa (IFCO) – Dogme Production Challenge.

  • Tracking Sasquatch (field report #2)

    A search for the elusive Sasquatch. The second chapter in an ongoing series. [with text from reported Sasquatch sightings in Colorado]

  • Tracking Sasquatch (field report #3)

    A search for the elusive Sasquatch. The third chapter in an ongoing series. [with text from The Sasquatch Field Research Manual (Enigma Research Group)] More on the Tracking Sasquatch series: http://cbattle.com/tracking-sasquatch-3/

  • The Shouting Flower

    A work about collaboration and process, “The Shouting Flower” approaches political resistance from multiple subject positions–plant, child, filmmaker–in an attempt to model what Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing calls “work across difference.” Using images processed in plant material that was gathered at key locations throughout the city, as well as direct animation and audio recorded on a child’s toy, the film documents its own creation within a landscape of hostility and neglect. A collaboration against cooperation, it becomes as it refuses. Refusing, dispersing, it shouts, “No!”

  • Livestock

    “Livestock” is a documentary study of one stage in the production of motion picture film. Most of the animals at the Warren Livestock Auction will be sold for industrial meat production. Their bodies will be slaughtered and processed, their bones prepared for rendering into gelatin that might one day suspend silver halide on a strip of acetate.

  • Abandoned

    An unfinished housing complex has been abandoned. The imagined future from the past is taken over by foliage and wildlife.