Film Categories: Labour

  • It’s Not Brakhage

    It’s Not Brakhage is a feature-length parafiction film, structured around an unnamed narrator’s investigation of a mysterious film reel, believed to be a lost work by experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage. Shrouded in speculation and actively contested, the film reel is believed to be the sole remaining artifact from a cancelled 1959 film festival, co-organized by Brakhage and military-industrial giant DuPont chemical. The story follows the narrator’s forensic deconstruction of the film reel’s history, sifting through a patchwork of theories and speculations that have arisen since its discovery, and connecting the artifact to DuPont’s wider networks of military-industrial research and artistic…

  • 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…

  • To Make Ends Meat 心頭肉

    As a Chinese-style sausage factory in Vancouver’s Chinatown closes down, the legacy and community it has fostered for over a century is celebrated and remembered through the eyes of one of its workers. Embracing subjectivity, intergenerational relationships and cultural revitalization, To Make Ends Meat 心頭肉 is a call to commemorate the old, in a city fixated with newness.

  • Wayward Emulsions

    Fleeting cinematic impressions of a wayward woman are captured in the oblique wanderings of emulsion lifted from stray reels of 35mm film. Winner, Experimental Short Grand Jury Prize, Slamdance Festival 2019

  • Between The Bullet and The Hole

    ‘Between the Bullet and the Hole’ is a film centred on the elusive and complex effects of war on women’s role in ballistic research and early computing. The film features new and archival high-speed bullet photography, schlieren and electric spark imagery, bullet sound wave imagery, forensic ballistic photography, slide rulers, punch cards, computer diagrams, and a soundtrack by Scanner. Like a frantic animation storyboard, it explores the flickering space between the frames, testing the perceptual mechanics of visual interpolation, the possibility of reading or deciphering the gap between before and after. Interpolation – the main task of the women studying…

  • Assembly

    Assembly is a short film that illustrates the struggle of the working class in Peru, in relation to the global workers movement. The grainy images, canted shots, still images and Russian montages offer a captivating five minutes of social reality in the fight against Neoliberalism. This film was commissioned by the Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto (LIFT) with the goal to capture the spirit of Super 8 and celebrate LIFT’s 30th anniversary.

  • Blair’s Last Day

    Blair Maddox has been projecting IMAX films at the Space & Science Centre in Edmonton, Canada for almost 30 years. ‘Blair’s Last Day’ documents his last day on the job before the IMAX theatre switches to a digital projection system, leaving Blair unemployed after projecting over 30,000 films.

  • The World in Ten Blocks

    Welcome to Bloorcourt, one of Toronto’s most diverse neighbourhoods. Small business owners from all over the world have made this one of the most vibrant parts of Toronto. Meet some of these immigrant entrepreneurs and hear about their dreams, struggles, victories, and the unexpected ways in which they’ve changed. An intimate journey into the kitchens and behind the counters of small businesses where cultures and traditions are preserved, shared, and evolve.

  • If I Were Any Further Away I’d Be Closer to Home

    A silent poem reflecting on the place of my mother’s birth and her first traces on earth. A generational portrait of South Asian “makers” becomes a perceptual voyage into memory, experience, and touch.

  • Potamkin

    In 1933, at age 33, Harry Alan Potamkin died of complications related to starvation, at a time when he was one of the world’s most respected film critics. In his writings, he advocated for a cinema that would simultaneously embrace the fractures and polyphony of modern life and the equitable social vision of left radical politics. This film-biography is assembled out of distorted fragments of films on which he had written, an impression of erupting consciousness. At the Odessa steps, trampling gives breath to the child. The bullet miraculously reforms the face. The Cossacks march backwards, retreating unseen into their…