Film Categories: Geography

  • Lines Drawn

    Shot in two downtown Toronto parks over the course of the pandemic, Lines Drawn looks at various measures of persuasion, containment and control that were brought to bear over the course of the City’s attempts to curtail the spread of COVID-19. Throughout the pandemic, space was defined by how the social bond was re-formed and which barriers were designed for mutual and directional protection. What are the shapes of the pandemic and how did they shape our interactions with each other? Supported by Media City Film Festival’s Chrysalis Fellowship

  • Camera Trap

    CAMERA TRAP is a comparative installation using moving images a hundred years apart. The first half of the work looks at Muybridge as both animal and landscape photographer, compared with the second half which works with current animal camera/video traps from the rainforests of Sabah (Malaysian Borneo). A visual and aural comparison of domesticated versus wild animals. Staged shooting versus remote capture. Caged sounds from the zoo versus field recordings from the rainforests. How does the way we use camera equipment on documenting animals then and now, tell us about what we are looking for through the lens? In collaboration…

  • Matin Dans Une Foret de Pins (Morning in the Pine Forest)

    The lives of six young people unfold in a journey through different worlds revealed and interwoven, where the boundaries between documentary and fiction, reality and dream cease to exist. The volatile and seductive landscape of urban and rural Latvia was treated as a rich context for the complex relationships one has with the world – inviting the viewer to come upon the questions that bind us in our common need to understand our humanness. This film is based on the lives of HELENA, EVA, JANKA, GUNTIS, ANNA and GALC.

  • Sea, carry my dream / Mer, emporte mon Rêve

    Toward the land, toward the sea. Where can a boy be safe? The universal story of fear and hope for boat people seen through young eyes. The little red fish shows him a mysterious world full of wonder and danger under the sea that his fragile boat is escaping on.

  • Radius

    From my perspective any place can be seen as sacred. I believe you can become so familiar with a place that you can feel the sacred in every aspect of its land, air and water. The more familiar I become with a place the more I tend to fall in love with it and in turn many of its truths are revealed. On March 31, 2022 my life partner Cheryl passed away in hospice. In April I decided to make a pilgrimage to places near our house where we enjoyed taking walks after moving to the village in October of…

  • River

    A hand-processed black and white study of the Ottawa River in winter. Commissioned by the Lightproof Film Collective with sound design by Eric Walker.

  • Toronto, Old and New

    Allegedly “bursting at the seams” for over a century now, Toronto is cacophonous, cosmopolitan, and often confusing. A landscape shaped by generations of dreams and desires, the metropolis bears the overlapping imprints of capitalism, colonialism, conflict, community and celebration. Juxtaposing found footage, paper ephemera, and newly shot 16mm material, “Toronto, Old and New” explores the relationship between past and present in Canada’s largest city.

  • Currents / Perpendicolare Avanti

    Currents / Perpendicolare Avanti is a camera-less, hand-made, 16mm film collage, based on the artist’s autobiographical experience as an immigrant. In three movements, the film explores the dynamics of inhabiting the in-between space of moving between multiple countries and their temporalities, through visual and sound abstraction, interlacing and recycling pre-existing film materials and, using fragments from anonymous orphan films. Utilizing these so-called scraps, Currents is a film of extensive remediation, treated by hand through the use of the emulsion lifting technique, thereby re-imagining, re-constructing, and de-constructing the liminality of immigrant life. The re-writing of the self in Currents is produced…

  • Skyscraper Film

    Can I use the film strip structure as an architectural element? Is it possible to use the celluloid from the film as a cement? Can these skyscrapers be turned into something else? Can solid lines blend into sensual, natural curves? Can I melt skyscrapers? Skyscraper Film was created to try to give a visual answer to these questions, arising from the artist’s relation to urban maps of various locations and their respective skylines, populated by imposing skyscrapers and reinforced concrete panoramas: Quebec, Kingston (Canada), Maryland, Pittsburgh, Baltimore (USA) etc. Cities are presented to us as an abstract handmade camera-less collage,…

  • Touch Chinatown

    Impressions of San Francisco’s Chinatown come to life through clear tape and historical imagery.