Film Categories: Flicker + Strobe

  • WE DON’T TALK LIKE WE USED TO

    “Shot between Hong Kong, Japan, and the US, this short is Joshua Gen Solondz’s most ambitious work to date, a portrait of the home and the world that is dense, textured, creepy, anxious, noisy, silly, and confounding, but always tender.”-TIFF “We Don’t Talk Like We Used To” continues Joshua Gen Solondz’s loose series of addled diary films with a film that is part travelogue, part affective almanac, and part cinematic noise show. With stops in Hong Kong, New Hampshire, Japan, and Brooklyn, the film alloys obscured faces, oozing on-screen text, throbbing abstractions, solarized superimpositions, and the occasional dad joke into…

  • Petal to the Metal

    This hand-processed 16mm film reflects on botanical animism. It is a song written for night-crawlers, compost, and shadows, inspired by human flower-lust. Water, fire, earth and air are interwoven with the garden’s creature crew. The work draws a parallel between the photographic alchemy of cinematic experiments and the photosynthetic processes of plants. Honourable mention, Top Canadian Short Jury Award, GIRAF 17 (2021).

  • Freak Folks

    Struggling with anxious thoughts, six individuals wander alone through the city in the late hours of the night. “Freak Folks” is an introspective and therapeutic experience that celebrates the human resilience and emotional connections between apparent strangers.

  • Rema Nascentes (Rheme maining sources)

    A place-specific film-excavation of the Bixiga neighorhood in São Paulo. Choreography of forces that cross present time. Filmancy, clairvoyance is the vision of what is taking shape. Allegory: lobby-color, speculates. Hollow in the heart of the city, a rock. A bird ‘rappina’ lands. Novelty: Quilombo, alley, dealers: step. Vai-Vai samba school’s black and white banner. Pictograms from Benjamin’s “The Arcades project”. Progress: plugging a river while it’s possible. Commodity: Matarazzo & Metro. The real state of things, real estate: banning organic. Ground- quotation, avocados, blue taroes, water tanks, oxum: (cosmo) political reaction. Rheme maining sources: life asking for passage.

  • The Beautiful Room is Empty

    “Haddad’s The Beautiful Room is Empty explores the loaded memories of space through his aunt, Marie, (re)visiting her childhood home and recalling the abuse she endured there. […] What have the walls been listening to? What have they absorbed, retained, and released upon a return, a farewell?” – Sarah Sarofim, Canadian Art

  • MAN MADE

    MAN MADE, a repurposed narrative of a boy who gets introduced to the wonders of life by a beautiful shining trumpet. But the struggle to be oneself has only begun. Utilizing found 16mm footage and both digital and analog manipulation techniques, Mikkola pierces conventional masculinity with a transformative queer gaze.

  • Homunculi

    Filmed sporadically and intuitively during the summer months of 2020 and 2021, Homunculi is a recontextualization of a personal archive of hand processed 16mm “home movies” and various cinematographic experiments. Reassembled, these once disparate images form a cinematic prism in which to view and confront the prevalent anxieties of an increasing uncertain future. Homunculi is a visual and sonic daydream, reaching beneath the facade of domestic and pastoral tranquility to reveal a lurking, inevitable force that promises to tear the world asunder.

  • Oracle

    A collaboration between filmmakers LeAnn Erickson and Jake Rasmussen, in conjunction with sound artist Howard Stelzer, Oracle is a video short that uses a variety of animation techniques to create a circular visual/auditory experience- revealing the Oracle.

  • Arrival 1, Arrival 2

    This experimental essay film springs from the final days of December 2020 when I moved from Chicago to Toronto. The film documents my move and then continues on alternate paths, weaving through the liminal spaces of borders, sickness, interpellation, and dreams. Content Note: This film contains extended discussions about fatphobia and disordered eating. Specifically, this film contains descriptions of food restriction, idealization of thinness, and intense emotional and physical pain after eating. After 11:41 there is no direct discussion of disordered eating. Flashing lights throughout. Loud noises throughout.

  • Lion in the Wind

    Fugue for wushu in the West.