Film Categories: Language

  • 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.…

  • processing…cleaning…refreshing…

    a depiction of an individual going through a phase in their life, they are navigating what constantly shifts inwards and outwards.

  • Fragmentasia

    An exploration of the sense of self, through kaleidoscopic imagery, distorted sounds, and a flurry of colours. Fragmentasia is a self-reflexive short, shot on 16mm and Super8, using animation techniques, prisms, and mirrors, to examine the outward self versus the internal self.

  • Don’t Forget The Water

    A phone conversation sets the diasporic table as a disembodied figure prepares Qahwah Arabi / Arabic Coffee. Here, the contradictions inherent in Google Translate’s instant camera feature are made visible through glitched mistranslations. Using these flaws as a prompt, the communication between a mother and a daughter considers ambiguity as a source of embodied knowledge. 

  • Sab Shimono: Acting “As If”

    On the eve of his eightieth birthday, acclaimed Japanese American actor Sab Shimono reflects on his lifelong commitment to the craft of acting, his struggles against racism and homophobia, and how his life was transformed by gay bars and marriage equality.

  • Avanti!

    “Avanti!” is inspired by Antonio Gramsci’s writings: as an idealistic young man, a romantic, a father, and a revolutionary. Throughout the work I explore themes of translation and research. What happens in the shift from detached researcher to impassioned participant? “Avanti!” considers what we lose when we reduce a person to only their thinking, when we abstract them from their lives. Image description: Blurry black-and-white close-up of a person’s face, yelling or laughing (?), with eyes closed and open mouth.

  • Dein ist

    A lecture on language in German.

  • Toe the Line

    TOE THE LINE follows Gloria Chau, a closeted teenage hockey player. When she’s not on the ice, she’s got a guitar in her hands and a snapback on her head. Her mother Nancy, a stylish Hong Kong woman, spends sleepless nights worrying about Gloria’s failing grades. Gloria is torn between two worlds: the fun but cutthroat world of hockey where she gets to be loud and proud in her queerness, and the one at home where she’s a recluse, using music to cope with being forced into becoming someone she’s not. Underlying these tensions is a deep racial divide. She…

  • Landmarks of Memory

    A tattoo ritual and hookah session memorializes a pre-war flower shop. After seeing its storefront in archival footage of the Lebanese Civil War, a first-generation daughter seeks information and connection to place. Scenes of 1976 Beirut are paired with today’s developed landscape, while roses are etched and coconut coals burn in a snowy diasporic setting.

  • A Hundred Years From Now

    Combining frame by frame animation, deconstructed cinematic images, and an immersive soundscape, A Hundred Years From Now by Arijit Debnath captures his search for the memories of his mother, activated by a celebration of Bengali cinema, poetry and music. This process of rediscovery comes together in a collaged portrait of cultural melancholia and personal grief.