Film Categories: Essay

  • A Month of Single Frames

    In 1998, filmmaker Barbara Hammer had an artist residency in a shack without running water or electricity. While there, she shot film, recorded sounds and kept a journal. In 2018, Barbara began her own process of dying by revisiting her personal archive. She gave all of her images, sounds and writing from the residency to filmmaker Lynne Sachs and invited her to make a film with the material. Through her own filmmaking, Lynne explores Barbara’s experience of solitude. She places text on the screen as a confrontation with a somatic cinema that brings us all together in multiple spaces and…

  • Unarchive

    Unarchive juxtaposes the filmmaker’s father’s life with the political history of Chile – his birthplace – over the past century. It reflects on how we remember and how we forget, and the role of the camera in transcending the complex space in between.

  • I Dream of Vancouver

    In a reality continually refracted through the lens of corporate technology, what remains of those who don’t fit into this vision of the world? I Dream of Vancouver is an experimental short that explores this question through the digital landscape of Vancouver, BC. Using hypnagogic visuals and a haunting soundscape, this work expresses the detachment from the lived experience of spaces as these spaces are subsumed by algorithms and mediated images. While focusing on Vancouver as a case study, this documentary explores issues that are relevant to the world at large, such as the link between corporate technologies and gentrification…

  • VIA KARELIA

    Tracing back a lost identity, hidden in the forests of an abandoned war zone. How does a trauma get carried on from a generation to another and is there a way to stop the cycle? The filmmaker tries to understand how to heal from the pressures of the past by searching for their grandmother’s childhood home. Taking the journey with their parents, they find themselves in a village located in the old Karelia, now a part of Russia.

  • sway

    A sequel to the pandemic-themed reflection “still”, “sway” explores the seductive – and destructive – pull of fear.

  • Autoritratto

    A short piece commissioned by Antimatter Media Art, a “portrait of the artist by the artist”, first exhibited as part of Automat compilation. It consists of recycled 8mm footage of Canadian landscapes, mixed materials, ink and film cement. As an immigrant, looking for, and collecting, past images of Canada is a way of imagining a past that I don’t have in this country. The re-writing of the self is produced through the archive of others via associative montage.

  • L’Arrière-Pays

    An autobiographical fable at the cross-section between SCI-FI and Memory Film. The film explores the journey of two dreamers trapped between Past and Present, between Dream and Reality. It combines excerpts from an immigration journal, found text and images suspended in a dystopian dark space.

  • A Life on the Borderlands

    This is a film about my father, who immigrated to Montreal from Chile in the early 1970s after a hard-scrabble life on the streets of Santiago as a youth. Like my mother, who immigrated from Argentina around that time, his mobile life was characterised by neither chain migration nor lasting social ties with members of his ethnic group. His story is also a story about class, politics, and complicated histories of migration and exile.

  • A Parent’s Wishlist

    A short film about upward mobility and working class aspirations, A Parent’s Wishlist focuses on something that could be found in many North American homes between the mid-twentieth and early twenty-first centuries – a set of encyclopedias. Dragged from one city to another and across the country by my Chilean father, his Encyclopedia Britannica set came to symbolise his hope for a better life for both himself, and for me.

  • The Places We Lived

    The Places We Lived uses a large family archive of Super8 and digital home movies from the mid-1970s to late 1990s to grapple with the hopes, dreams, and disappointments of two South American immigrants who moved to Montreal in the wake of the excitement and optimism generated by Expo ’67. This story focuses on the father, Jose (“Pepe”), whose life in Canada followed four hardscrabble decades in Chile. A story about childhood and fatherhood, aging, capitalism, and obsolescence, The Places We Lived opens up new questions about class, memory, diasporic narratives, and the complicated histories of migration and exile.