Film Categories: film studies

  • Through Foreign Eyes

    The filmmaker thought of making this poetic, mosaic documentary in a bookshop, when she came across the words of poet Manoel de Barros about “the accent of the place of our origin we carry in our eyes”. She never found the quote again, but in the course of the next few years, she carried out the project with the help of other contributors, mainly the film editor. She created a film essay combining reflections on the identity and ethnic roots of several natives of the Brazilian city of Recife, who live abroad, and the images of the places where they…

  • Film’s Final Curtain

    Celluloid running through a projector has been a window into our lives for over a century. In this digital age, where cheaper and faster is perceived to be better, film is in grave danger. If the death or extreme marginalization of film is upon us, it’s worth mourning.

  • Where We Stand

    A discussion on the death of film. Where We Stand is a haunting portrait of theaters shot on handmade 16mm iodo-bromide emulsion. With a strong commitment to retaining the language of film, Where We Stand takes a good hard look at the fragile future of films made on film in this digital age.

  • Vanilla

    Vanilla takes you through the everyday ordinary life of a disabled senior citizen living in Ottawa, Canada. It is a portrait documenting aging and the loneliness of those suffering in silence. The black and white film was shot on 16mm Bolex film camera using a KODAK 7222 Double-X Negative film. Processed by Niagara Film Lab (Toronto). Created as part of Independent Filmmakers Co-operative of Ottawa (IFCO) – Dogme Production Challenge.

  • ARTIFACT (circa 2006)

    The archaeology of Identity. Consider a world where all human communications are represented by numbers, a digital world. Imagine a future archaeologist finding a DV cassette from hundreds of years ago (a real found object, circa 2006, full length and uncut). Imagine trying to decode this ancient digital object, codecs unknown, obsolete, hardware long lost. Crack the code? Available algorithms scan, databases compare, construct, deconstruct, reconstruct the artifact. 2006, the dawn of self-by-numbers, digitized identity. What human fragments, fugitive narratives, remain? Do we have a future history? What will the algorithms decide? All bookings of this film include a free…

  • the framing of perception

    “I saw the light…” Sun, light, darkness, shadow — from time immemorial all weighted with significance and wonder. What mastery over nature, over others, to grasp the sun, control light itself! Know its speed, its heat, its colour, its radiation, its nature – is this not the power of the gods? Cinema is messaging with light and shadow. Figure and ground. Light, onto which we project significance, now transports our information. Perception shaped by our experiences, our interpretations, our projections, our illusions. Frames of drama and comedy, journalism and documentary, propaganda and advertising, all combined daily and edited, reproduced for…

  • Letters From Vancouver

    Letters from Vancouver (1973) comprise two films, made at the same time, that share a common interest in “the medium is the message” (McLuhan), and form a reflexive, self-referential enquiry into the film medium itself. Together, “the politics of perception” (33min)and “the framing of perception” (33min) form a meditation on our audio/visual creation, bearer of information and culture, meaning and representation. It is a medium with extraordinary powers, able to evoke the deepest feelings of love and loss, anger and fear, laughter and thoughtfulness, yet of great fragility, fading with time, precarious on a perforated strip of celluloid.

  • Waiting (انتظار)

    A young woman journeys to visit her grandmother. What transpires between the unsaid and silence propels into a prolonged moment of tension and desires of connection. Image description: A young woman and her grandmother sit next to each other on a couch. They both look straight ahead with stony-faced expressions, not talking.

  • the medium is the message

    An age of numerology communication : numbers digits : representation algorithms : codecs compression : bitrot : memory what message? THE FUTURE IS THE PRESENT

  • Ruines

    Sur l’autoroute 15, juste à l’extérieur de Montréal, se dresse un monument à la Révolution tranquille : les écrans en décomposition du Ciné Parc Laval, ouvert en 1971, l’année où les ciné-parcs ont marqué l’histoire du Québec. En 1947, sous la pression de l’Église catholique, les ciné-parcs sont interdits au Québec. C’était la tentative de l’Église de réglementer le sexe en dehors de la sphère domestique. À l’origine un drive-in à 2 salles de cinéma, le Ciné Parc Laval est rapidement devenu 4 écrans en raison de sa popularité. Ce film utilise des segments de Frissons (1975) de David Cronenberg…