Film Categories: Geography

  • Torrey Pines

    “Torrey Pines” is a stop-motion animated feature film by director Clyde Petersen. Based on a true story, the film is a queer punk coming-of-age tale, taking place in Southern California in the early 1990’s. Raised by a schizophrenic single mother, Petersen’s life story unfolds in a series of baffling and hallucinated events. With a mother fuelled by hallucinations of political conspiracy and family dysfunction, twelve-year-old Petersen is taken on a cross-country adventure that will forever alter the family as they know it.

  • 24.24.24

    24.24.24. is a view of a day in concurrent time. All of the day’s twenty-four hours are presented at once. In the minutia of time, banal events unfold and are made extraordinary through the camera’s gaze. People go to work and to school, time is stretched and skewed, the act of taking a walk or watering a lawn develops a magical quality. Light gains character, shadow reshapes objects, and time becomes palpable. Take a look.

  • Somnium Lapidum (Dream Stones)

    This stop-motion 16mm film offers an audiovisual meditation on the material animation of stones. The concept is inspired by Camillo Leonardi’s “Speculum Lapidum”, published in 1533, which describes the magical healing virtues of a variety of stones, categorized by colour. The character-based animated vignettes are inspired by the woodcuts in “De Hortus Sanitatis”, a natural history encyclopedia published in 1485, which details various methods of harnessing the power of gems. It was believed at the time that a given gem’s powers could be absorbed through focused viewing. Proposing an analogy between this belief and attraction to cinema, this film offers…

  • ôtênaw

    “ôtênaw” is a film documenting the oral storytelling of Dwayne Donald, an educator from Treaty 6, Edmonton Canada. Drawing from nêhiyawak philosophies, he speaks about the multilayered histories of Indigenous peoples’ presence both within and around amiskwacîwâskahikan, or what has come to be known as the city of Edmonton.

  • Belen

    BELÉN is a story about the consequences of experiencing a profound inspiration. The inspiration that one woman, a humble cocoa farmer and musician from a small Afro-Venezuelan village, unaware of her powers, generated in her community and in people all over the American continent, during her life, and after her death as a spiritual being. Queen of the Quitipla. Master of bamboo’s sounds and silences. Core and bridge to the African American community, to its connected beats and historical fights. A trip into the puzzled reminiscences of this woman’s life (and death), captured through more than 100 hours of amateur…

  • V

    Iceland, 2016. Mythical landscapes and moment capture. Nature as mirror of, or backdrop for the self.

  • Lunch Time

    In this film we drive through downtown Cairo. While exploring the urban life and daily routine of the streets near Tahrir square, we sink into a labyrinth where our path keeps on being cut. During the 2011 revolution it was often said that “the people took back the streets”, but since then the police and military have returned to power and show their supremacy by controlling the public spaces, leaving many to adapt to a system where they have no voice and must work around the obstacles that are left behind.

  • Golden Boat

    Inside a derelict warehouse in the middle of a salt pan, people from around the world are waiting to be taken to a mysterious place that promises a better life. Some find the wait intolerable, desperate to leave and to explore the imagined possibilities on the other side. For others, the house offers a momentary respite from a troubled past and the difficult migrant life that awaits them in the future.

  • 8401

    8401 is a moving-image and light landscape painting depicting a multi-layered, fragmented view of Villa Grimaldi in Santiago, Chile. Now a memorial park, Villa Grimaldi was a clandestine detention, torture and extermination centre during the Pinochet regime (1973-90). The image is built of hundreds of images extracted from five years of Google Street Views of the address and site, Avenida José Arrieta 8401.The sound is composed of fifteen audio loops of ambient sound and voice, deconstructed from a field recording gathered during a 2016 tour of the facility. A multitude of shifting perspectives give the impression both of deprioritizing time…

  • RUPTURE

    By and large humans tend to create narratives about themselves, then often make great effort to conform reality to that narrative. This was not a threat to planetary survival 10,000 years ago when we were scattered in small bands worshipping local deities and relying on nearby gathered foodstuffs with only stone tools. It is quite an other thing when we are packed into mega-cities with nuclear weapons and ambiguous connectivities, along with relationships imbued in instruments that far exceed an individual’s capacity to fully comprehend or to realibly navigate our various systems. Sequence in order of appearance: Secret Bunker –…