Film Categories: Landscape

  • The Flower and The Flood

    Following the seasonal cycle of a saffron farm based in the Fraser Valley, the film explores unmechanized labor through harvesting the delicate crocus stamen by hand. After an atmospheric river decimates the flourishing saffron crop in 2021, the flood waters temporarily return Semá:th Xó:tsa to the valley more than a century after its forced draining. The film traces the interconnected history of this sacred lake with the rebuilding of the saffron crop; cultivating community and the most expensive spice in the world. Collaborating with the saffron crocus and other plants through eco-processing and analogue processes, the family garden offers us…

  • Trajectories of Now

    Over an 18-month period, 18 racialized and gender diverse artists took part in creative research to develop artworks and activations responding to the guiding question “What change do you want to make with your art?”. Their work culminated in their group exhibit Trajectories of Now: An Anthology. Through visual, audio, and tactile works, Trajectories of Now documented critical narratives of relationships to identities; both personal and collective. In this short film, eight Trajectories artists discuss their artworks and processes for voicing, surfacing and amplifying creative advocacies and resistances for social change.

  • Innocents Abroad

    A warmly amusing look at a bus-full of American tourists on a whirlwind tour of Europe. The eclectic soundtrack includes Mozart, Bob Dylan, Sandy Denny, Jonathan Richman, and others.

  • Inquiry Film, The

    The Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry (also known as the Berger Inquiry) was a precedent-shattering examination of Native rights and economic development in Canada’s North. The contentious issues brought out by the Inquiry are very much alive today as Southern Canada still seeks to exploit the resources of the North. “The Inquiry Film” documents and reveals the process of the Inquiry and humanizes a complex political and national issue. Awards: Best Documentary, Canadian Film Awards; Golden Athena Award (Best Feature Film)

  • Landfall

    “Landfall” was shot in Prince Edward Island, near the family home on the Northumberland Strait. The original footage, shot in 1974, was a kind of interactive, camera “dance” with the environment. Poetry became important when the footage was later superimposed onto its own mirror-image, to help direct the viewer away from the luring yet limited world of image-identification. “I Thought There Were Limits,” by Quebec poet D.G. Jones, w as used to encourage the viewer to reject Newtonian notions of space and time, and to conceptualize the film’s interplay between absence, desire, and presence. Eventually, the limitation of text as…

  • Landscape

    Using fixed frame timelapse, 15 hours of a day in the mountains, showing the changes in the sea and sky, is compressed into eight minutes. Designed originally to be rear-projected onto a plexiglass screen framed in a false wall by a traditional wooden picture frame.

  • Last Days of Contrition, The

    Shot in the late 1980s in deserts of the American southwest, LAST DAYS is a poetic, harrowing vision of the apocalyptic consequences of militarism and the bankruptcy of the American ideal. Set after the fall, disembodied voices prophesize and attest over a swirling ménage of unsettling desert landscape, weaponry, and dystopian nationalist symbolism.

  • Local Knowledge

    “David Rimmer’s film is at once a somber and celebratory meditation on time and place. Its title, ‘Local Knowledge’, is marine terminology for what a skipper must know when navigating dangerous waters. Rimmer is an experienced sailor and the film’s spiritual and geographical center is aptly named Storm Bay, where he spends his summers. But it’s a troubled site. The camera, moving with tide and swell, seems to strain anxiously at its anchor and it becomes clear from here on in nothing will ever be at rest. Local Knowledge won’t save anyone anymore. “Rimmer’s film shatters the comforting dualities of…

  • Mammals of Victoria, The

    Note: This film is a companion piece to “A Child’s Garden and the Serious Sea.” This film begins with a series of horizontally running ocean tide waves, sometimes with mountains in the background, hand-painted patterns, sometimes step-printed hand-painted patterns, sometimes step-printed hand-painting, abstractions composed of distorted (jammed) T.V. shapes in shades of blue with occasional red, refractions of light within the camera lens, sometimes mixed reflections of water – this “weave” of imagery occasionally revealing recognizable shapes of birds and humans, humans as fleeting figures in the water, as distant shapes in a rowboat, as human shadows, so forth. Increasingly…

  • Across

    “Across” is about the sometimes difficult journey from one psychic space to another. From a place in the abusive past, to a place called survival.” – Liz Czach, Toronto International Film Festival “Across” has a gentler power, furiously and passionately engaging with the unobtrusive landscape to uncover what most of us have yet to discover.” – Take One, Fall 1997