Film Categories: Essay

  • Blinkity Black

    One blink, one lost image. Another one, another lost image. And so on thousand times a day. This is the story of a man marked by lost images from his life. Blinkity Black is created from all the moments that escape the eyes simply because our eyelids close. If we could discover all these lost moments, what would we discover? And witch image to save?

  • My Canada Train Journey

    50-plus years after a memorable overnight Canadian train ride, Sandy McLennan boards regional and remote lines, with main line and public transit between them. This time shooting Double 8mm film, the same format he fell in love with while screening family home movies just for himself. What was he thinking?

  • Echolocation

    The rain in Oakland, my grandmother’s home in Baghdad, my aunts’ voices in What’s App, my daughter learning to count to 10, my brother playing the darbuka, the cicadas in Texas, the walls of my studio, the search for new forms.

  • Letter from Blackhawk Island

    From her home in Blackhawk Island WI, the poet Lorine Niedecker traded lively and impactful letters with numerous peers, most notably Louis Zukofsky and, later, Cid Corman. After a brief sojourn in New York, she lived alone in a one-room cabin for much of her adult life, walking several miles to nearby Fort Atkinson to work as a copy editor at a dairy industry newsletter until failing eyesight reduced her to menial labour. Niedecker connected to the outside world by post, and among the small shelf of books she kept for herself were several collections of letters, including those of…

  • Passengers

    In 2024 I decided to visit some places I had been to before, places near where I am in the present and places I’ve never been to in the past. As I travelled from here to there, filming this and that I was reminded once again that nothing stands still and nothing stays the same. One of the things that I always wondered about was the intention of the occupied places I would see and what determined the way in which they were expressed. Sometimes it seemed clear while at other times it didn’t appear clear at all. I was…

  • Goldjungen

    English Title: “Golden Boys” “If you speak in a low voice, no one hears you.” Two narrow alleys in Istanbul. A crowd of men, yelling. Screaming, shouting, chaotic gesticulation, ­grimacing faces, a deafening buzz of wild voices. The verbal noise dominates the scene. A communicative situation, incomprehensible at first to the alien bystander who doesn’t speak the language. ­Apparently they are traders, I find out. And they call it “the walking stock market”. But what does it really mean? “Today it’s a very quiet day. Everything is still at rest.”

  • Tarpaulins

    The point of departure for “Tarpaulins” was a colorful disturbance on the cityscape of Los Angeles: a home in the distance festooned with a giant striped tarp. These are termite fumigation tents and filmmaker Lisa Truttmann follows their story on a two-year long investigation as she hunts down the tents, the homes, the termites inside and their traces. As the film goes on, the termites soon become our allies, guiding us through Los Angeles’ neighborhoods on their own terms. Questions of life and death, profit and loss, home and un-home, macrocosm and microcosm are brought to the fore in pursuit…

  • Characters

    Hú Zhǎng Zū writes ancient Chinese poems with water on the ground in Fuxing Park, Shanghai. After a few minutes, the characters dry out and disappear. She comes to the park almost everyday and practices her handwriting with her friends and colleagues. Together they have lively discussions about the strokes and shapes – both amongst each other and with the many spectators. Hú Zhǎng Zū is the only woman within the bustling crowd of men, and due to her calligraphy skills she is respected and highly admired. I come back to see her often, in order to learn from her…

  • Landmarks of Memory

    A tattoo ritual and hookah session memorializes a pre-war flower shop. After seeing its storefront in archival footage of the Lebanese Civil War, a first-generation daughter seeks information and connection to place. Scenes of 1976 Beirut are paired with today’s developed landscape, while roses are etched and coconut coals burn in a snowy diasporic setting.

  • Memory Rituals [Part Two]: Memory of Trees

    The second in an ongoing, annual series. Thinking about remembering, about forgetting, and about the memory of trees.