Film Categories: Families

  • Arrhythmia

    Footage from a cardiac catheterization, intertwined with a recording of a telephone conversation and old 8mm home films, tell the story of a mother’s conflicting desire to escape a poor marriage by returning to her homeland, despite the possibility of being victimized at the hands of the government upon her return due to a past incident. “Arrhythmia” is an intimate piece about family, distance and identity.

  • Fireland (The Sloko Valley Fire)

    A young man seeks to find adventure, love and work, leaves for the Yukon, finding all three and more as he matures and finds his calling.

  • Kimchi Fried Dumplings

    An Asian Canadian man comes home with a new boyfriend for Christmas to find his younger brother, who is also gay, resentful for being left to care for their aging parents

  • My Father, Francis

    My Father, Francis: a father and daughter collaborate. A comment on kinship, diasporic labour, devotion and the factory as a site of creativity.

  • Finding a Place to Sleep

    Based on stories my grandmother told me, I re-imagine while working as a cleaner the experiences of my ancestors during the Holodomor (forced famine) in Ukraine during the Stalinist-Soviet era. The “film” image is re-invented through digital video to enact a sense of ambiguity between authenticity and fiction, as can also be present in the act of oral storytelling. This is one chapter in “Stories for a Future Generation,” a series of shorts which together tell the stories of my family’s and my own migrations, and the inter-generational impacts of those upon our lives and on those of our family’s…

  • The Weight of Snow

    A home movie of a trip to Chernobyl, a dying matriarch and a set of troubling personal circumstances, The Weight of Snow is an essay documenting memory, time and place. A film referencing the tradition of personal travelogue films of The Escarpment School and the essay style of Sans Soleil, The Weight of Snow travels from Canada to Chernobyl from the perspective of a young man exploring radiation in the midst of death, cancer and emotional turmoil. A collection of all techniques used throughout the Lion series, The Weight of Snow is the centerpiece of the work. Echoing the collage…

  • Forever

    Part dream, part documentary, Forever weaves history and hedonism to form a world of dandelions, hypnosis, bicycles and memory. Created from experiments replicating the effects of radiation on film, the piece explores the nature of airborne radioactivity and brings us from a woman’s story of adolescence, to a bicycle race, to life in the Soviet Union. A bricolage of pop culture and personal histories, Forever is about looking for dandelions and finding atoms. As the opening film of Lion, Forever employs spray and smudge techniques to explore the concept of airborne radioactive contaminants and how they travel in open air.…

  • Sodium Lamp Study

    A technical experiment about exposure and an interview of a woman’s experience with radioactive ablation therapy for thyroid cancer, Sodium Lamp Study is a meditation on exposure, treatment, and the unseen emotional effects of radiation. The visual element of Sodium Lamp Study explores the photographic concept of reciprocity failure – when the exposure of an image is separated in to multiple exposures rather than a single exposure with the same light strength, the results become unreliable. In a similar way, patients facing the treatment of thyroid cancer are presented with an option of a single dose of radioactive iodine, or…

  • STILLE.D

    STILLE.D is a meditation on Walter Benjamin’s concepts of ruin (as nostalgia, regret, decay, loss), as well as the paradox of the bourgeois interior constituting both refuge and amplification of the alienating impulses of the city. It plays with the different definitions of “stille” such as stillness, to put (in place), a drop (of liquid), finding a corollary with Stephen Chen’s musical setting of Philip Larkin’s poem.

  • ars memorativa

    ars memorativa is an experimental documentary in four chapters that examines what is left behind when someone passes away and how memory traces emerge from the remaining artifacts and memories. the four people intersected with the directors life in a variety of ways and their stories are shared in a mix of forms: hand processed celluloid, digital animation, audio interview and home movies.