Film Categories: Landscape

  • Lion

    A project spanning three years of production and research, Lion explores the Chernobyl disaster and the nature of radiation, recollection, and personal history. Lion navigates atomic fallout and a girl’s adolescence, a dream before death, radiation as a cause and a cure for cancer, masculine bravado, feminine obsession, a trip to Chernobyl amidst the death of a matriarch, and the destruction of memory. This conceptually arranged film album is composed of seven works on 16mm and hand processed with darkroom techniques that mimic the effects of radiation on film. The series combines memory, history, pop culture and technical experiments to create visual representations…

  • PACED

    By exploring the different meanings of pace (as speed, as measure, as constraint), PACED investigates the twin paradoxes of modern nomadism: alienation from increasing connectivity, and the constant movement of everyday life that keeps returning one back to the same place. Using non-repeating 10-second clips (shot primarily with a camera phone) which flicker across 5 split screens, PACED both collides and regulates the movement and semantic interaction of the visuals and music in accordance to an internal structure to comment on how urbanism has divorced its residents from the natural, and how its rituals and veneer distract from its cruelty…

  • STILLE.D

    STILLE.D is a meditation on Walter Benjamin’s concepts of ruin (as nostalgia, regret, decay, loss), as well as the paradox of the bourgeois interior constituting both refuge and amplification of the alienating impulses of the city. It plays with the different definitions of “stille” such as stillness, to put (in place), a drop (of liquid), finding a corollary with Stephen Chen’s musical setting of Philip Larkin’s poem.

  • BROKEN ANGEL (GEBROCHENGEL)

    In Frankfurt near St. Peter’s church on Klaus-Mann-Platz, there is a memorial with an angel sculpture (aka Frankfurter Engel) for the homosexual men and women persecuted and murdered during the Third Reich. 2013 was a tumultuous year for LGBT rights like the spike in hate crimes in the U.S. post-DOMA, and passing of anti-gay legislation worldwide (most notably Russia and India). On 6 May 2013, the anniversary of Marlene Dietrich’s death and 80th year past the Third Reich, Stephen explores the historical and ongoing queer struggle and gilded apology of monuments in a guerilla performance by colliding the Frankfurter Engel…

  • The Incorporated

    THE INCORPORATED is shopping as ritual-a twenty-first century, yet primeval dance. The Incorporated was shot entirely inside mega-malls with a pocket camera, dismissed or unnoticed by security guards and public alike. It is comprised of mass behaviours and intimate unguarded moments between individuals. The ritual is enacted in front of logo texts like Armani, Lacoste, Holt Renfrew, Victoria’s Secret, Banana Republic, Apple, Microsoft, and Tesla. No product is ever shown, but we know what those words mean.Outside, the cosmopolis may be divided by class, race and ethnicity. But inside the mega-mall, the diversity of its peoples-commingled-is strangely celebratory.

  • Edgy Sexy Modern

    Edgy Sexy Modern is shopping as ritual — a twenty-first century, yet primeval dance. Edgy Sexy Modern was shot entirely inside mega-malls with a pocket camera that was dismissed or unnoticed by security guards and public alike. By using many creative editing techniques, this film unmasks mass behaviours and intimate, unguarded moments between individuals. The ritual is enacted in front of logo texts like Armani, Lacoste, Holt Renfrew, Banana Republic, Apple, and Tesla. No product is ever shown, but we know what these logos signify. Outside class, race and ethnicity may divide the cosmopolis, but inside the mega-mall the diversity…

  • brouillard #14

    brouillard #14 is the result of in-camera temporal layers shot on the path that extends from the filmmaker’s family cottage to a lake. “In his ongoing brouillard – passages series, Alexandre Larose creates long-take sequences by superimposing first-person, Hamish Fulton-esque walking trajectories shot along a man-made path leading to a lake. Using a lens wide enough to condense the human eye’s field of vision into the frame’s 1.33 aspect ratio, Larose creates spectral superimpositions infused with a meteorological mix and the intense lusciousness of the Quebec landscape.” — Andréa Picard

  • Slaughterhouse

    This multi-framed work weaves several inter-connected threads of loss: of land and agriculture, of property and business, through political, social, economic and environmental slaughter. The materials in this archive are gleaned from public and personal sources such as the National Archive of Canada, in the story of a nineteenth century aboriginal woman and land rights activist Nahnebahwequay (1824-65) and more recently organic farmer Michael Schmidt, from excerpts of the Farmer’s Advocate and Family Herald publications 1958-1968, also a trip into the artist’s familial past, and the rise and fall of his family’s slaughterhouse and pork processing plant, Hoffman Meats (1951-81),…

  • Aged

    Aged is an experimental documentary about the relationship between aging and corporeal perception. From 2005 -2011, along with my sisters, I was a caregiver for my father, during his swift movement into old age. Over this period I maintained a practice of diaristic sketching using film, video and sound, and through this process I collected a significant archive of intimate moments, at the summer cottage, where my father chose to die. This raw material has been worked and reworked through various modes of digital and filmic manipulation. Ultimately Aged uncovers the common process of aging, the cinematic elements acting as…

  • Béton brut

    Béton brut celebrates both the fine detail and monumental scale of London’s Brutalist structures.