Film Categories: Essay

  • touch

    touch (ing), —(ed): Feel, move, affect, be in contact, tangent to, in relation; injure slightly; slightly crazy “My window tonight casts light out onto the snow, I cast from my eye a glance, a touchless touch…” Jorie Graham, “To 2040” We look, we touch, we make connections sometimes, and sometimes we proceed by groping blindly forward… Note that “touch and “touch : BE/longing” are companion pieces. They may be shown individually; or one after the other; or together simultaneously side by side. One aspect of these works for me was the division of all digital video in one and all…

  • seeds are meant to disperse

    seeds are meant to disperse (2015-ongoing) is an ongoing project where I grow, save and share seeds. Seeds take time to grow, to harvest, to prepare, and to share—an act that I see as gift as much as necessity and survival. As such, the seeds are offered as trade or gift, in an attempt to encourage and support alternative systems of exchange. As the seeds are gifted and grown they are meant to help others imagine building a world different from the trajectory it is currently on. As an ongoing and forever growing project, I continue to adapt and rethink…

  • connecting thru grasses

    Looking to prairie grass ecosystems, as well as the technologies that map and reflect the diminishing biome, connecting thru grasses considers how we might both map and define prairie boundaries anew. Considering how satellites passing overhead reflect an image of the earth (and thus of ourselves) back to us, and how these images shape or mis-shape our understanding of the land and our relationship to it, the work looks closer at TERRA, a research satellite that has circled the earth since 1999 constructing images for use in the monitoring of environmental and climate data. http://cbattle.com/connecting-thru-grasses/

  • BAD STARS

    Beginning with the root of the term disaster – from the Greek (dus-) ‘bad’ and (aster), ‘star’ this project considers disaster from an astronomical sense, imagining multiple scales of disaster as causing disruption and temporary disorientation on a planetary scale. Humans have looked to the movement of stars as a way to make sense of the terrestrial for millennia, developing elaborate systems to read celestial bodies as a way to explain and predict events on earth. Studying the stars in order to discover more about the galaxy, astronomy tells us that we are in fact born of the stars, made…

  • The Translation is Approximate

    This video focuses a conversation that Naqvi witnessed between her aunt and a domestic worker over financial matters. For many reasons — the ambivalence of the situation, the respective socioeconomic positions of the two women involved in the scene, and the very nature of the recording, which careened between documentary and voyeurism — these images have long haunted Naqvi. In the Translation is Approximate (2021), Naqvi retrieves the original footage that she shot in 2013 and traces back her thoughts about what motivated her to revisit this material. This short video both provides insight into her approach and fundamentally questions…

  • Seaview

    Seaview (2015) is an experimental film which combines home video and captured footage from Karachi, Pakistan. Naqvi travels back to her family’s country of origin to compare childhood memories of this place with lived experience. In the first sequence, she shows video footage of her first trip to Clifton Beach in Karachi. The accompanying text describes her visit to the same beach seventeen years later, and the difficulties in trying to document this place, both as an image maker and as a woman. Naqvi confronts her own personal struggle of being caught between the ideals of Western and Eastern societies.…

  • Lines Drawn

    Shot in two downtown Toronto parks over the course of the pandemic, Lines Drawn looks at various measures of persuasion, containment and control that were brought to bear over the course of the City’s attempts to curtail the spread of COVID-19. Throughout the pandemic, space was defined by how the social bond was re-formed and which barriers were designed for mutual and directional protection. What are the shapes of the pandemic and how did they shape our interactions with each other? Supported by Media City Film Festival’s Chrysalis Fellowship

  • As close as your voice can call

    A film about language, about the way trauma inflects grief, and about learning to speak with the dead. This work engages a personal archive of children’s books owned by my late mother, many of which feature her signature. I had encountered Deanna Bowen’s “sum of the parts: what can be named”  (2010), which attuned me to the lasting power of these traces, so I began to think of the signatures as a connection to my mother. I decided to use them to perform a kind of ad-hoc seance where I learned to copy her signature exactly. This forgery opened me…

  • Radius

    From my perspective any place can be seen as sacred. I believe you can become so familiar with a place that you can feel the sacred in every aspect of its land, air and water. The more familiar I become with a place the more I tend to fall in love with it and in turn many of its truths are revealed. On March 31, 2022 my life partner Cheryl passed away in hospice. In April I decided to make a pilgrimage to places near our house where we enjoyed taking walks after moving to the village in October of…

  • Freya

    Tethering falconry and motherhood, Freya weaves together themes of death and magic, where seasons re-arrange, just as myth and memory are re-cast through a childhood spell.