Film Categories: Families

  • from where to where من وين لوين d’où vers où

    In the pieces I store and carry along my many different roads, my dialects may be signs of bruises but reclaimed they form the skin and voice I live in. Experiences of the where, from where, to where; a narrative amongst others. And as the words finally trickle through the needles, fingers seeping with tints trace the outline of whirling fields where I hang a jasmine branch on suspended necks and in the in-betweens, language soothes, swans mend, and the daily brings calm. We are the comfort of our multiples.

  • your father was born 100 years old, and so was the Nakba

    A Palestinian grandmother returns to her hometown Haifa through Google Streetview, today, the only way she can see Palestine.

  • xīn nī 廖芯妮

    xīn nī 廖芯妮 (“understanding you”) is an intimate auto-ethnographic portrait expressed through dance and digital technologies. Liaw engages in intergenerational conversations with her family and community to transform the linguistic divide between her Chinese name and its Hakka translation into a space for healing. Drawing on themes of decolonizing queerness to emphasize self-love and self-curiosity, the work explores both physical and technological attachments. Bodies made up of 3D-rendered cultural objects hold space for the stories of Liaw’s elders, while expanding the growing web of her ancestral knowledge. 

  • One Thing I Can Afford

    Louie Sanchez is the performance moniker of Filipinx artist Eirene Cloma. Cloma has recently completed a small collection of songs that broadly reflects on their working-class Filipinx upbringing in North Vancouver and the entanglements of diaspora, interracial relations, and queer desire that texture their everyday experiences. The video for their song One Thing I Can Afford broadly addresses queer and trans friendship in the diaspora, Filipinx masculinities, and everyday enactments of transgenerational care.

  • Her Violet Garden

    Through painful and nostalgic recollections, a young refugee woman tries to come to terms with the losses of war, her shattered life, and the alienation between her and her mother. “…It is with subtlety and a touch of magic that Irena Joannides manages to delve into this woman’s inner world, unfolding in front of the viewer’s eyes her protagonist’s nostalgia, her most intimate thoughts and desires, which recount lost persons and places.” – Ricardo Lopes, Cine-Epiloge

  • Karaoke

    The home has changed. The palm oil trees have grown in endless symmetry. The landscape rusts and the nostalgia turns. KARAOKE is a homecoming story. BETIK returns to his village to help his mother with the karaoke a few years after the death of his father. During the day, he has also taken a job with his uncle making karaoke videos. KARAOKE is a story that takes you back home yet reminds you to go back where you came from. KARAOKE is a debut feature film about home and deception in a karaoke club within a palm oil plantation in…

  • light in my eyes

    A personal and poetic walk through light, love, and memories of a blind grandfather. Artist/filmmaker Christopher Wiersema considers his grandfather’s enigmatic and eloquent point of view while playing with his own. The film’s soundscape centers around a phone call with the artist’s grandmother, Rina Pullia, as she reflects on caregiving for her husband, Angelo, in Chicagoland.

  • our voices in reverse (portrait of mama)

    My first analog film, filmed from the roof of my mother’s home in west Texas in summer 2013. An experiment in reversing roles, and the precursor to a feature film that came several years later. Edited in camera on Super 8 black and white reversal film.

  • Sister Mother Lover Child

    A house of women adjusts to life in the aftermath of an event unnamed.

  • Amal’s Garden

    Amal and Mustafa are an Iraqi Turkman couple that have shared a long life together in northern Iraq. When Amal decides to renovate their home after a decade of war, Mustafa retreats to the garden, where he encounters the curious gaze of his grandniece and her camera.