Film Categories: film studies

  • A to Z

    A cross-hatched family fantasy about nocturnal furniture love. Two chairs fuck.

  • The North Sea

    “As Benjamin had predicted, nothing brings the promise of happiness encoded at the birth of a technological form to light as effectively as the fall into obsolescence of its final stages of development.” – Rosalind Krauss Supported by the City of the Toronto through the Toronto Arts Council.

  • Imagine none of this is real

    A strange, melancholy travelogue through the post-human world. A record of the land and the resonance of its history. The images and the medium exist in a tense balance, where each amplifies and distorts the other. This film is not only about the landscapes being captured, but the media being used to capture it.

  • Orgy of the Blood Parasites

    J. G. Ballard’s novel High-Rise and Cronenberg’s film Shivers, both of which detail an apartment building’s descents into chaos, were released in 1975, creating a collision in history as fascinating as it is bizarre. Both are about non-normative sex in imposing spatialities and both are visions of disturbed surrealist dystopia of body mutations. Later in his career, in 1996, Cronenberg adapted a J. G. Ballard novel with the fetishistic film Crash, but in Shivers, dread and disgust circulate spatially around the apartment complex on Nun’s Island, next to the city of Montréal, to which I have returned. I bring together…

  • Ruthless

    Ruthless (2019) Go back in time and witness a ruthless tale of unrequited love. The black and white film was shot on 16mm Bolex film camera using a KODAK 7222 Double-X Negative film, and processed by Niagara Film Lab in Toronto. Filmed in a few hours and is inspired by the Dogme 95 cinema movement. Thank you to The Marías, The Independent Filmmakers Co-operative of Ottawa (IFCO), Kodak, Pudgyboy’s, Marie-Hélène Villeneuve, Justin Pariat, and Warwick Walton. Screenings: September 2019 – The Independent Filmmakers Cooperative of Ottawa at Headquarters (Ottawa, Canada) November 2019 – A Night of Misfit Films at Onyx…

  • the_other_images

    A hard drive, 2.8 terabyte leftover data from a project that was shot 10 years ago. In 2008, the author and filmmaker Iris Blauensteiner made her first short movie. Now she sifts through this waste material: outtake scenes, photographs, sound files, e-mails, script passages, discarded ideas. This data was archived and well stored, but time has taken its toll. Old data formats cannot be played anymore because they are no longer compatible with current players. The multitude of read errors and image distortions disallow a comfortable recollection of the past, the pictures and sounds are not what they used to…

  • MY FRIEND VINCE

    Vince is a street hustler. I’m the friend. Or am I? Set in raw, downtown Toronto in the early ’70’s, and co-directed by the late Howard Alk (The Murder of Fred Hampton, American Revolution II, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Alk) The film explores the question of friendship in Vince’s world, a world built on cheating and lying, and then compares relationships formed in that world with relationships influenced by film making.

  • No Mime Game

    An effective mime-skit showing the perils of drinking and driving. A mixture of mime, camera work, and special effects prepares us to expect the inevitable crash. An excellent film for use in driver and health education or dramatic arts classes.

  • Momently Gone

    Momently Gone is a dive into the interiority, in the form of five video-poems, declining, like a theme with variations, the relationship to our missing ones. It was inspired by the mourning of two of my sisters, both of whom committed suicide, and that of my father, who died of cancer. This common thread gave birth to a set of works that is soothing rather than challenging, because there is sweetness in feeling close to those who are absent, there is sweetness in gathering around a universal reality. Thanks to digital tools, I work with layers of images and sound…

  • Pigment-Dispersion Syndrome

    The diagnosis of an eye disorder incited this meditation on fear and beauty. Glimpses of curious and creative souls peek out of countless hand-painted film frames. Infinite colors and textures burst, blend, and challenge the primacy of uniform vision.