Film Categories: environment

  • Rats and Welfare

    Set to a potent activist song by Zoe Chilco, “Rats and Welfare” takes aim at corporate greed and the rats in power.

  • buffalo lifts

    Awash in sumptuous colour, a herd of buffalo desperately try to hold on as they struggle to cross the film frame.

  • Christo in Paris

    Since the days of King Henry IV, Paris’s Pont Neuf has inspired artists. Now it is the focus of the environmental sculptor Christo – and the millions of Parisians who watch him create an astounding architectural poem from the oldest bridge in their city. Rich in political intrigue and artistic debate, “Christo in Paris” charts the fulfillment of the artist’s ten-year obsession: the wrapping of the Pont Nuef, the same bridge where he courted his wife, Jeanne-Claude. The result is a ravishingly beautiful tapestry of art and romance.

  • Towards Everyday Lightning

    Contrast itself can be seen as a thematic symbol in this work that plays on enlightenment as an elusive but ever-present possibility. It employs Zoroastrian semiotics and Zen-like circumstances to punctuate the appearances and flows of quotidian labour that have challenged the human condition since Sisyphus.

  • About Flight: The Surly Bonds of Earth

    In this collage of simple images from everyday life, such as feet and butterflies, birds and flowers, the pedestrian nature of human origins is found at play amongst images of a compromised nature. From vignettes of machine-fed birds that mirror a fascination with wings, this film reflects on some of the darker fruits of man’s desire for the capacity for flight. Using both colour and B&W stock, “About Flight” is mainly processed by hand and modulated with colour tints, toning and both in-camera and darkroom effects.

  • Loon Lights

    In the habitat of the Loons a dynamic force is discovered. Its rhythmic play shifts and darts amongst the elements that host it, sometimes transposing its form in moods that plumb the amplitude of all that is visible by day or night. Chromatic intervention surprises moments of pastoral bliss with symphonic shatterings, borne on the medium that is the sustenance of film itself.

  • Observatory, The

    An ambient track of evening sounds accompanies rephotographed sketches of the night sky by Jerry Spevak. “The Observatory” turns the heavens on its head: the blackness of space becomes the white of the page, the stars and galaxies precise points of black graphite. The pages of Spevak’s sketchbook are animated to capture the rotation of and movement through a vast, spectacular universe. Selected screenings: Toronto International Film Festival, 2004; Best of the LIFT $99 No Excuses Film Festival, Toronto, 2004

  • Fuga di Olmo, La (Olmo’s Escape)

    Olmo is a blue Italian ladies’ bike. After spending years abandoned in a dusty garage, Olmo finally sees the road again after escaping from a yard sale. What follows is an epic ride all over Toronto during which Olmo discovers the truth about being a bicycle in a vast urban metropolis. Part adventure-comedy, part environmental fable, “La Fuga di Olmo” is a light-hearted cautionary tale about what could happen if you don’t ride your bike.

  • Element of Light

    Inspired by the elements of nature on a journey through light and sound. Painted directly onto the film and accompanied by scratched optical sounds. A stream-of-consciousness motion painting. “A work of pure delight. A master of scratch animation, Reeves extends the tradition of visual music first explored in Canada by Norman McLaren. This is sublime work of cinematic dexterity.” – Philip Hoffman (Fabulous Festival of Fringe Film, 2005)

  • Lasso

    My meditation on the romance of the “Wild West” – pure spatial motion. – and – Exploring the virtual potential of the horizon line while framing that spatial experience. “All landscapes can be described as hills and valleys, and time is said to flow. But geographically speaking, hills and valleys are maxima and minima whose definition presupposes the choice of gravitational vector. Such that the reading of a landscape, in a relation not to extrema but to inflections, leads us towards an experience of weightlessness.” – Bernard Cache, “Terre Meuble”