Film Categories: Geography

  • Passengers

    In 2024 I decided to visit some places I had been to before, places near where I am in the present and places I’ve never been to in the past. As I travelled from here to there, filming this and that I was reminded once again that nothing stands still and nothing stays the same. One of the things that I always wondered about was the intention of the occupied places I would see and what determined the way in which they were expressed. Sometimes it seemed clear while at other times it didn’t appear clear at all. I was…

  • Trespass

    In September 2024 I went on a filming trip to southwest Saskatchewan and southeast Alberta. To get there I travelled the TransCanada Highway from my home in BC. On the way there and back I took some short stops to take a closer look at some places that appeared interesting. Often these places had restricted access or no public access at all and the longer I stopped somewhere that is not open to the public the greater the chance I would be told to leave. One such place is in the Rocky Mountains where I setup my camera outside their…

  • Symbiosis

    Occasionally I’m able to spend time in a place where I can observe how the natural world takes shape outside the anxious time frame of our hurried species. In this world relationships seem to have evolved to perpetuate balance over long periods of time as opposed to short cycles of calm interspersed with brief periods of chaos. Overruns and schedules don’t appear to exist there as they do in our manufactured world. Symbiosis is defined as a close, prolonged association between two or more different biological species. This relationship can be symbiotic (mutualistic), where both parties involved benefit from the…

  • Endless Thirst

    Endless Thirst is a deep dive into the otherworldly and misunderstood bog biome. Filmed in Canada, it draws attention to the harm inflicted on these ancient wetlands. An aerial view of a bog in its natural state suddenly sinks into the unimaginable, then appears to evaporate into ghostly images of Sphagnum moss (a bog’s keystone species) imprinted on 16mm film. Endless Thirst alludes to the bog’s reliance on water for survival and humanity’s unquenchable desire for resource and supply. It examines the entanglement of human and more-than-human processes that link to the climate crisis.

  • Fluss

    A journey down the Danube River is transformed into a dream space of half-seen images and flickering shorelines. Though at times abstract, the river remains certain, always moving towards the sea. Filmed in black and white 16mm and hand-processed, Fluss is a companion to River (2023), a study of the Ottawa River in winter. Commissioned by Ottawa’s Lightproof Film Collective.

  • Western Brook Pond

    A boat trip through Western Brook Pond, an ancient fjord in Newfoundland’s Long Range Mountains, carved out over millions of years by tectonic activity and glaciers. Western Brook Pond was shot on video and 16 mm film, which was hand processed with apples and coloured with turmeric and walnuts. Note: Contains strobe effects.

  • Epitaph

    Epitaph is an examination of site and memory. It follows the effects of plate tectonics on the landscape of Chile – the filmmaker’s birthplace – and the small and large cycles of destruction and rebuilding the ever-present earthquakes trigger. Filmed in both Chile and on the Tablelands in Canada, a site central to the modern understanding of plate tectonics, Epitaph incorporates eco-processed 16 mm footage, video, documents from public and private archives, and found footage to weave an epitaph to a home in the process of leaving the filmmaker, first as a result of exile and then to the gradual…

  • Gan Tang, The Lake

    In the summer of 2023, the government of Jiujiang launched the Gan Tang Lake Cleansing Project. Within weeks, this ancient lake with over two millennia of history was drained. Nearby in Gan Tang Park, a boy wakes up in the rain. There, the destiny of Gan Tang awaits.

  • PATH

    Employing a simple three-part structure, “PATH” is about personal experience and the interpretation of that experience. Both humorous and serious, the film is a cross-Toronto exploration, expansively taking in a wide variety of people, events and situations. In creating a dynamic web of associations, “PATH” invites participation in the act of perception. The film’s structure works like this: Davis is filmed connecting dots on a street map; next she walks that distance on the street, filming as she goes; then she recalls and interprets what she has seen in memory sequences. The street sequences have a variety of different rhythms…

  • Salvage Archives

    Salvage Archives continues Rufelds’ research into cultural and subcultural expressions of late capitalist alienation, and the forms of collective storytelling that take shape under the shadows of unjust material systems. Told in a hybrid narrative style, mixing elements of essay film, social realism, and neo-noir, Salvage Archives oscillates between two narrative threads, counterposing a lonely online conspiracy theorist and a disembodied historian of agriculture. The two figures recount their stories in alternating chapters, perversely mirroring each other as they wade into the knotted abstractions of capitalist productive systems, logistics networks, patterns of accumulation, and systemic waste. As both narrators’ grandiose…