Film Categories: Landscape

  • Doing and undoing: poems from within #1 radiotherapy

    It deals with interventions that I had made with my mother during her cancer treatment. The film is part of large project dealing with my mother’s cancer healing process. Hacer y Deshacer: Poems from Within (2019) is an interactive video installation. Most of the video sequences show Gelis’s mother undressing, one strand of yarn at a time, sometimes in Panama’s Casco Viejo (historic district), sometimes in the turbulent waters of the Pacific. Using her mother’s body, she tells the story of a cancer survivor, the story of countless others. Gelis invites us into the healing process: the viewer can change…

  • The Island

    A garden between Oakland and Berkley where its inhabitants, marginalized by gentrification, plant fruit trees and flowers to pay homage to their loved ones who died in battles against poverty. This is a space of love and freedom cared by Brian for the last 25 years. The island resists, as a living legacy of the Black Panthers who were the first to organize the neighbourhood.

  • Phenomena

    An experimental triptych filmed in Super 8 and 16mm over a four-year period, “Phenomena” continues an evolving preoccupation with landscape and celluloid practices. Three scenes are observed: a snowstorm in downtown Ottawa (where the artist lives), a gentle winter thaw on a bog in Eastern Ontario, and the raging Ottawa river during spring run-off. The simple act of observation is transformed into a post-modern cataloging of events, prompting the viewer to wonder to what extent the natural world and phenomena can exist unmediated in filmed representation. ———- Triptyque expérimental tourné en super-8 et en 16 mm sur une période de…

  • Night Garden

    This personal short film uses a series of telephone conversations with the filmmaker’s mother as she tries to reconcile facing cancer for a fourth time. Low-fi video filmed at night captures her mothers bond to her home, shaping the tension and isolation of living life with a terminal illness. Nocturnal lush garden imagery also evokes private reflection, and in one final moment, proposes a provocative question about time.

  • The Shouting Flower

    A work about collaboration and process, “The Shouting Flower” approaches political resistance from multiple subject positions–plant, child, filmmaker–in an attempt to model what Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing calls “work across difference.” Using images processed in plant material that was gathered at key locations throughout the city, as well as direct animation and audio recorded on a child’s toy, the film documents its own creation within a landscape of hostility and neglect. A collaboration against cooperation, it becomes as it refuses. Refusing, dispersing, it shouts, “No!”

  • wish

    Against the background of the Canadian prairies and the coast of Eastern Canada, wish explores Korean monosyllabic words. While counting to three in Korean, the video explores the multiple meaning of single-syllabic words from one to three that also signify work, labour, profit, etc. Using an observational lens, I documented my retired parents on a trip to the East Coast of Canada. In this video, I explore Canadian landscapes from a diasporic point of view revealing how new narratives emerge when immigrants engage with the Canadian landscape. wish is dedicated to my parents who contributed to the economic fabric of…

  • Abandoned

    An unfinished housing complex has been abandoned. The imagined future from the past is taken over by foliage and wildlife.

  • Waiting (انتظار)

    A young woman journeys to visit her grandmother. What transpires between the unsaid and silence propels into a prolonged moment of tension and desires of connection. Image description: A young woman and her grandmother sit next to each other on a couch. They both look straight ahead with stony-faced expressions, not talking.

  • Before After Again

    In a series of reflections and reversals, this dual-projector film follows the flow of carbon from mountains to sea, as it is transformed from forest ecosystem into industrial landscape, and back again. Commissioned for the End of the World project by Iris Film Collective and funded by the Canada Arts Council. Although its interpretation was left entirely to us, the project title made reference to the West Coast as the edge or end of Canada; to global concerns over the compromised and fragile state of the planet; and to the often predicted “end of film”. To link the final films…

  • Animal Bridge U-3033

    Animal bridge is an experimental nature documentary about a green bridge above motor highway. Animal Bridge U-3033 is about the parallel realities of humans and wild animals. It’s filmed during a year on a bridge above motor highway. These bridges are architecturally engrossing structures, addressed only to the nature, allowing animals to cross the highway. The built environment meets the untouched nature in this narrow strip of urban forest. The 35mm film sequences shot with an old camera create contrast with a mysterious reality captured by trail cameras.