Film Categories: Identity

  • the smallest steps

    What does it take to have a voice? For women whose voices are often suppressed, the journey is full of challenges. Many quit along the way. But in Ottawa, Ontario, two law students and two survivors of violence have decided to take a stand and join the anti-violence movement. The only trouble is, they don’t know how to be activists. In their homes and on the streets, they take their first activist steps while veteran activists provide historical context to the movement. If they can overcome the personal and political barriers that threaten to derail them, they will join a…

  • Seaview

    Seaview (2015) is an experimental film which combines home video and captured footage from Karachi, Pakistan. Naqvi travels back to her family’s country of origin to compare childhood memories of this place with lived experience. In the first sequence, she shows video footage of her first trip to Clifton Beach in Karachi. The accompanying text describes her visit to the same beach seventeen years later, and the difficulties in trying to document this place, both as an image maker and as a woman. Naqvi confronts her own personal struggle of being caught between the ideals of Western and Eastern societies.…

  • i see me watching

    Based on the artist’s personal struggle with gender, i see me watching speculates on the journey to and struggle with finding identity by presenting a first-person depiction of a singular self that has been split into two. The film displays the character’s ever-changing emotions as they follow an anonymous figure through unfamiliar surroundings, and gain awareness of the figure as an integral part of their being.

  • Modulations

    A short film about memory, dislocation and cultural identity.

  • Shoes Off

    Shoes Off is a story about a Brazilian immigrant who becomes the subject matter of an artist’s canvas in Brooklyn. The film explores the themes of the queer diaspora beyond the family trauma trope in immigrant stories through the lenses of danger and desire. Shoes Off blends together its influence from the aesthetics and tropes of DIY porn, thrillers, and realistic dramas. Shoes Off is the portrayal of the challenges, pleasures, and adventures of what a queer immigrant experience could be, based on true stories. Shoes Off depicts how vulnerable and unique the queer experience can be in a search…

  • He Loves Me Until He Hates Me

    He Loves Me Until He Hates Me is the long-form music video from Baby, You’re Projecting, Vivek Shraya’s debut label release on Mint Records. Director statement: Taking inspiration from such 90’s classics like The Bodyguard and erotic thrillers, “He Loves Me Until He Hates Me” creates a meaningful (and playful) look at the unpredictability of masculinity–how it can fluctuate in insidious ways within a relationship, how one can be worn down in this type of power dynamic, and worse, how that can turn into lateral violence towards other women.

  • Atmospheric Arrivals

    This film is at once a living archive/polytemporal memory bank and a love letter to my other selves. I consider the act of revisiting my personal archives a time travelling practice and incorporating this into my films is an exercise in making said practice legible to others. “Atmospheric Arrivals” is about home and the (im)possibility of return. The “atmospheric arrival” captures a means of coming into being through memory and imagination; by reaching across spacetimes to “fetch” parts of the self that may exist in elsewheres.

  • 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.

  • Only the crow knows him / Seul le corbeau le connaît

    The misrepresentation of images through the story of an old man who lives in the street. One day he sees photographs of himself in an art gallery. He sees himself portrayed as an old homeless man. He has no history, no childhood, no mystery.

  • Over the Island

    On the island of Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, the act of leaving has become ingrained into the culture. Since the closure of its main industries, the Glace Bay coal mine and the Sydney steel plant, many young families have been forced to relocate, migrating thousands of miles in the pursuit of work. ‘Over the Island’ is an experimental documentary that follows a mother traveling back home to the island, and a filmmaker attempting to connect the past with the present. This film deconstructs the concept of ‘home’, and investigates how one’s sense of belonging, self identification and familial relationship are…