Film Categories: history

  • sway / pull

    Created during the COVID-19 pandemic when queer spaces were disappearing across Toronto, sway / pull is a meditation on the erosion of Hanlan’s point beach in both literal and figurative senses. Hanlan’s Point Beach, located on the Toronto Islands, was the site of Toronto first gay pride celebrations in 1970s and remains a queer haven today. Additionally, the Toronto Islands have faced poor city planning that has led to a significant amount of erosion on the beach. This film plays with the concept of erosion by the physical pushing of sand to speak back to the literal erosion of the…

  • Events in the Tunnel

    Drawn from Super 8 films in the artists’ personal archives as well as found amateur 8mm footage, “Events in the Tunnel” presents an absurdist abbreviated retelling of Canada’s colonial history as defined by that great colonial trope, the cross-country train trip. In the transitional void of a train tunnel, we witness familiar 19th and 20th century paradigms of white middle-class conformity as represented by images of travel, amusement, and domesticity, with Canadian culture embodied by a chimeric portrayal of the early 20th century painter Tom Thomson.

  • HK Uprising

    A tribute to the ongoing protests in Hong Kong that are taking place three decades after the Tiananmen Square uprising. Note: This film can be displayed as a multi-channel installation with May 35.

  • Sab Shimono: Acting “As If”

    On the eve of his eightieth birthday, acclaimed Japanese American actor Sab Shimono reflects on his lifelong commitment to the craft of acting, his struggles against racism and homophobia, and how his life was transformed by gay bars and marriage equality.

  • C’est à qui, cette ville?

    “C’est à qui, cette ville?” is a response to the 1984 film, “Ville, Quelle Ville?” This original super 8 film documented various places in Toronto’s east end and reflected upon a young woman’s life in the city. 38 years later, “C’est à qui, cette ville?” revisits many of the same locations and contemplates a more mature perspective on urban living. This film was shot on outdated super 8 stock which gives the image a patina of time passing. Musical score by Montreal-based artist and composer, Jackie Gallant.

  • The Sun comes out at Night

    During a severe thunderstorm in Saskatchewan, Canada Buckminster Fuller* appears, disappears, then re-appears in a gas station parking lot discussing World War I, the shift from animal/human power to the machine, as well as the law of thermodynamics and evolution. If I were a futurist, I would predict that the world Buckminster Fuller describes in the 20th Century, or the world we are familiar with today in the early 21st Century will be a very different world in the 22nd Century. Acquiring energy is the core concern of all living entities such as photosynthesis, or vegetable/animal matter. Along with water…

  • What Travelers Are Saying About Jornada del Muerto

    Visitors and residents of the Tularosa Basin, site of the first detonation of an atomic bomb, contribute to the production of public memory as they offer philosophical reckonings, logistical advice, and plaintive texts after making “the journey of the dead.” Between 1945 and 1992, the United States federal government exposed people to the radioactive fallout from over 200+ detonations of above-ground nuclear weapons. Made in remembrance of the 75th anniversary of the detonation of nuclear weapons in the US and Japan and the 340th anniversary of the 1680 Pueblo Revolt, which forced Spanish colonizers out of New Mexico and returned…

  • Handful of Dust

    Prussian blue can be used to render images and counteract radiation poisoning. This obituary is composed of sequences of cyanotypes, exposed in the sand using paper sensitized with handmade emulsion and negatives from a 1954 Hollywood film. Rates of cancer in the film’s cast and crew reflect that it was shot downwind during the period of above ground nuclear testing. Handful of Dust, produced in the Utah canyon where the 1954 film was shot, is designed as an antidote to recover the memory of the downwinders. IMAGE AR: 2.35:1 NOTE ON THE SOUND: The integrity of the original –a dirty…

  • The Sea [is still] Around Us

    Rachel Carson is dead, but the sea is still around us…This small lake is a sad reminder of what is taking place all over the land, from carelessness, shortsightedness, and arrogance. It is our pool of shame in this,’ our particular instant of time.’ E.B. White, 1964 A postcard usually enhances the reality. The contrast is more stark in Corinna, Maine, a former woolen mill town on the shores of Lake Sebasticook, where years of dumping industrial waste contaminated the water. In 1964, the author E.B. White mourned the death of fellow Mainer Rachel Carson and the altered ecology of…

  • Savage / Future

    Editing to the soundscape of shaking Iroquois white corn and finger tapping, Seneca filmmaker Terry Jones uses personal and historic still images to link his family and the American Indian Residential Boarding School experience.