Film Categories: Essay

  • Finding Another Entrance, Trying the Same Door

    ‘Finding another entrance, trying the same door’, is an experimental animation that considers drawing, perception, and agnosticism. Abstract images are accompanied by an artist statement-like voiceover which considers these themes. This text, which is written in a personal voice, wrestles with the feeling of uncertainty and hesitation, while recognizing the limited guarantee of leaving these states.

  • Menders

    What story do the marks of time tell? “Menders” is a three-minute animation following a female art conservator restoring Velázquez’s “Rokeby Venus.” Using creative methods that reveal imperfections and embrace fragmentation, she navigates the tension between a polished ideal and an unvarnished history. As she reflects on both the artwork’s past and her own identity, she asks: Can the beauty of art be found in its scars? This film invites viewers to see restoration as a dynamic process of making, unmaking, and remaking.

  • Avant Seriana

    Mom, you brought me back to our homeland. All I know about these harsh landscapes I learned from books written by the hand that burned these mountains. I try to undo the colonial myths engraved into my memory, but the hills escape my gaze. Do you think I, too, have become the white djinn spoken of by the legends surrounding our martyrs? Avant Seriana is an essay film shot in Super 8 in the Aurès region of Algeria. Observing the landscapes of my native land, I realize that they are divided into several images and times. Two different countries are…

  • Epitaph

    Epitaph is an examination of site and memory. It follows the effects of plate tectonics on the landscape of Chile – the filmmaker’s birthplace – and the small and large cycles of destruction and rebuilding the ever-present earthquakes trigger. Filmed in both Chile and on the Tablelands in Canada, a site central to the modern understanding of plate tectonics, Epitaph incorporates eco-processed 16 mm footage, video, documents from public and private archives, and found footage to weave an epitaph to a home in the process of leaving the filmmaker, first as a result of exile and then to the gradual…

  • It’s Not Brakhage

    It’s Not Brakhage is a feature-length parafiction film, structured around an unnamed narrator’s investigation of a mysterious film reel, believed to be a lost work by experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage. Shrouded in speculation and actively contested, the film reel is believed to be the sole remaining artifact from a cancelled 1959 film festival, co-organized by Brakhage and military-industrial giant DuPont chemical. The story follows the narrator’s forensic deconstruction of the film reel’s history, sifting through a patchwork of theories and speculations that have arisen since its discovery, and connecting the artifact to DuPont’s wider networks of military-industrial research and artistic…

  • Salvage Archives

    Salvage Archives continues Rufelds’ research into cultural and subcultural expressions of late capitalist alienation, and the forms of collective storytelling that take shape under the shadows of unjust material systems. Told in a hybrid narrative style, mixing elements of essay film, social realism, and neo-noir, Salvage Archives oscillates between two narrative threads, counterposing a lonely online conspiracy theorist and a disembodied historian of agriculture. The two figures recount their stories in alternating chapters, perversely mirroring each other as they wade into the knotted abstractions of capitalist productive systems, logistics networks, patterns of accumulation, and systemic waste. As both narrators’ grandiose…

  • How To Burn A Cross

    A Super 8 experimental film transforms the ritual of cross-burning into a stark meditation on violence, spectacle, and inherited American terror.

  • E.C. Roe Expressway

    A Super 8 experimental film and a meditation on living in Windsor, Ontario under the influence of American television, blending dancers from a Detroit TV station with a quiet sense of hometown memory.

  • Danny in the Airship

    Danny in the Airship is a Super 8 experimental film test that blends home movies into an early meditation on space, time, and the memory of my brother Danny.

  • Two or Three Saprophytes

    Two or Three Saprophytes is a video essay that traces a speculative history of the industrial revolution, its ecological backdrop, and its intellectual legacy of growth-based thinking. Breaking from strictly didactic or documentary forms, the film defracts its historical research through a hallucinatory poetic lens, mixing critique and fantasy to frame the interconnected histories of mushrooms, trees, coal, chemicals, machines, and capitalists as a kind of ecological ghost story. Visual and textual motifs of circles, spirals, hexagons, and “revolutions” punctuate the film, sketching associations and contrasts between historical movements, economic patterns, rotational pistons, chemical diagrams, and ecological balance. Posing a…