Film Categories: environment

  • Saving Gorillas. One Sip At A Time

    Uganda is home to the critically endangered mountain gorillas surrounded by people near their protected habitat who are also struggling to survive. Doctor Gladys Kalema – Zikusoka realized that the farmers were not being given a fair price for their coffee, which led them to use the national park to meet their basic family needs for food and fuelwood. Thinking about new opportunities for the African Community as well as saving the gorillas from diseases and poaching, she founded a social enterprise so humans and gorillas could coexist.

  • P L U M E

    Fingers pluck fallen evidence of flight; placed and traced to make avian light.

  • Pinhole Park

    “Pinhole Park” was created using a 35mm film tin modified into an outward-looking 59-pinhole camera that registers images on a single film loop mounted in the tin. Each loop is exposed in one moment with 59 pinhole “lenses” to create as many distinct images that, when presented in series, create a panning of the landscape in various directions. The work was exposed on outdated black-and-white 35mm print stock acquired from Archives Canada discards, and processed by hand in Caffenol chemistry, a less environmentally impactful developer made with coffee, vitamin C, and washing soda. The film and photographs document a city…

  • До Землі (To the Ground)

    A three-channel video installation which depicts various plants from Saskatchewan that were captured during my year-long mentorship with Sandra Semchuk (supported by BC Arts Council). The project applies the approach of ethnobotany, in this case combining stories of both Ukrainian and Ukrainian Canadian people about the medicinal use of different plants. The video triptych pairs close-ups of plants together with audio stories about them, giving an inside view of an interwoven connection between Ukrainian people and plants, while at the same time unveiling the history of immigration through individual family stories. By including both English and Ukrainian language the work…

  • fuck

    A short solo film made in quarantine, “fuck” is part silent meditation, part protest, part magic spell for a better world.

  • Rema Nascentes (Rheme maining sources)

    A place-specific film-excavation of the Bixiga neighorhood in São Paulo. Choreography of forces that cross present time. Filmancy, clairvoyance is the vision of what is taking shape. Allegory: lobby-color, speculates. Hollow in the heart of the city, a rock. A bird ‘rappina’ lands. Novelty: Quilombo, alley, dealers: step. Vai-Vai samba school’s black and white banner. Pictograms from Benjamin’s “The Arcades project”. Progress: plugging a river while it’s possible. Commodity: Matarazzo & Metro. The real state of things, real estate: banning organic. Ground- quotation, avocados, blue taroes, water tanks, oxum: (cosmo) political reaction. Rheme maining sources: life asking for passage.

  • temporal assemblages

    temporal assemblages is an ecological video poem exploring human presence and absence in natural and built environments. Although the performers in the film are directed within the frame, the locations serve as canvasses for improvisation and the landscape is an equal player in the narrative of the scene. A meditation on impermanence and the transience of place, the title is inspired by assemblage art where fragments of existing artistic objects are reconstituted into new artworks. The filmmaker here samples her own archive of media materials produced over several decades of practice, from analogue photography, Super-8mm and 16mm film recordings, early…

  • Conversations on the Lake

    Conversations on the Lake investigates politics of dwelling in rural Northwestern Ontario communities along the Lake Superior north shore. It was nominated for Best Documentary at the 2014 Female Eye Film Festival and was shown in film festivals internationally, including travelling festivals and in rural communities abroad and in Canada and the US. The film explores how the land, its waters, and its landscapes are valued by citizens who live and work in communities bordering the Canadian side of Lake Superior, the largest freshwater supply on the continent, expressing a sense of place unique to the region. With the landscape…

  • on breathing

    Sound and visual essay showcasing the light, wind, movement, breath, and the strength of the Earth.

  • Homunculi

    Filmed sporadically and intuitively during the summer months of 2020 and 2021, Homunculi is a recontextualization of a personal archive of hand processed 16mm “home movies” and various cinematographic experiments. Reassembled, these once disparate images form a cinematic prism in which to view and confront the prevalent anxieties of an increasing uncertain future. Homunculi is a visual and sonic daydream, reaching beneath the facade of domestic and pastoral tranquility to reveal a lurking, inevitable force that promises to tear the world asunder.