Film Categories: film studies

  • Active Pass

    “The footage and audio for ‘Active Pass’ were filmed and recorded while I worked on the B.C. Ferries over several years. Active Pass is a narrow space between two islands in Georgia Strait, the halfway point of a good ride, a tourist’s blurred iconic dreamscape – and the simple question, What is on the other side?” Music by Jason Tait.

  • Nanaimo Station

    “A collage of family archive narrow gauge footage embracing/refuting the ideas of nostalgia and lost innocence, the contemporary commingling in our minds of the romantic past and easy irony. We can’t go back. The home we search for is gone. The kinder, gentler, magazine we wish we could live in never existed at all. We are lost. Hurrah. “This footage, including my first steps, was filmed by my namesake, Clive Brown, a friend of the family, our adopted ‘Uncle Clive’, and a west coast fisherman. Nanaimo, British Columbia, is where my family first attempted to set up a home in…

  • Jew and the Irishman, The

    “‘Can’t you take a joke?’ They asked us that for years. The young artist’s role as witness, cataloguing the abject misery of his betters – then later, communing with mother moon and father darkness. Suburban car wrecks and the long walk home. ‘A friend recently suggested that the key biographical moment captured in this piece (witnessing my father’s temporary sense of freedom after transgressing the social contract of white, middle class, 1970’s, British Columbia) may have been when I decided to become an artist.” Music by Christine Fellows.

  • Saigon Apartments

    “The artist watching the weak doing the poor. The film-maker’s eye as voyeur’s lens. The camera as gun. If violence is the new sex, then TV news is the new pornography. Romance language yoked to the class struggle. Bulls eye. “This one’s about one-way interfaces in reference to class and power dynamics. It’s common in our culture for artists to live in low rent neighbourhoods, and therefore to witness the daily misery of the poor, which often informs their art. But this witnessing is generally done from an outsider’s perspective. At times this complex of watching, hearing, and recording can…

  • Bus North to Thompson With Les at the Wheel

    “Les Brandt drives for Grey Goose Coach Lines due north from Winnipeg to Thompson, Manitoba, as well as on long distance charters all over North America. He was recently awarded the ‘Million Safe Miles Award’, as well as ‘Driver of the Year’. “I drove highway bus myself for many years – it was an exceptionally good seasonal artist’s job, that I still miss. When speaking with Les, I’m reminded in particular of the summer of ’87, when I drove a route from northern British Columbia to the Yukon. Over the years I’ve come to admire people, like Les, who do…

  • Condo

    “Buildings modeled on mausoleums, filled with retirees. What can we make of this? The word ‘condo’ has become charged with meaning in our culture. “The question of where to live has recently reached a fever pitch for many people in the richer Western industrialized nations. People are moving with greater and greater frequency, as if desperate to find the perfect ‘resting place’. At the end of the road is a gilded question mark. Is this what we worked so hard for?” Music by Jason Tait.

  • Neighbours Walk Softly

    “‘Neighbours Walk Softly’ is an anti-war protest poem, a test of the idea of neighbourhood, and a highlighting of the dividing lines we’re only too willing to fight to defend in the inevitable times of crisis. “This Super 8 and video footage was collected in an upscale Vancouver neighbourhood over the period of one year. The act of looking through a lens caused me to realize what wasn’t there to be seen – even though there weren’t any physical walls to keep out the poor and the less beautiful, somehow they were missing from the footage I collected. “The familiar…

  • Unbreakable Bones

    A celebration of my love for my parents and of their bravery in the face of death. Footage shot from the windows of planes high above the Rocky Mountains, on trips between Winnipeg and the West Coast to visit my parents: broad metal wings equaling the heights of material invention, the dream-like hush of air travel, human endeavour sailing through blue ether. Music by Jason Tait.

  • Shadows Choose Their Horrors

    “Shadows Choose Their Horrors” is the dark and melodic diary of a necromancer, as she lives her secret life between the world of mortals and the realm of lost souls. The film, shot silent with intermittent inter-titles, tells the story of dark and sinister forces as they move through the life of Madame G (Winsome Brown). Madame G tries to bond with her favorite undead, using magic and ritual to give them life and pleasure, but a devastating outcome drives her to do the unthinkable. Finally, Madame’s struggle to overcome the loneliness of evil brings her out, into the light,…

  • I have no memory of my direction

    “i have no memory of my direction” is a feature-length experimental narrative. The story unfolds through a Canadian-born Japanese woman’s voice-over as she dreams her way though Japan. Ostensibly searching for an emotional connection with her aging father, the woman contemplates her own inherited culture and familial touchstones. Her North American pop-culture sensibility fuses with a distorted Japanese perspective to create a surreal interpretation of a “Japan of the imagination.” This fictional landscape is peppered with invented Japanese myths, ruminations on memory loss, the temporal space of digital photography and the ghosts of inherited imagination. DVD version available for institutional…