Film Categories: Language

  • 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.

  • Work(ing Together) in Process

    On a quest to obtain some misdelivered camera batteries, Sam Koopman finds himself in a Rotterdam-based sex shop. Here he meets Marty who works there, and this chance encounter turns into a cinematic project between the two. When Sam turns the camera towards this new stranger, the two end up embarking on a year-long journey to create a film together. Their shared process of self-discovery turns this playful desktop film into a profound meditation on the nature of non-fiction film.

  • A Semiotic Square for Violent Bear

    What does our culture dream? How can we locate that dream within the logics which govern our lives? Half collage, half essay, half serious, “A Semiotic Square for Violent Bear” is a busy, referential riff on the political moment.

  • Nimer (Family)

    Nimer—meaning “family” in the Even language—follows the life of a nomadic family in Yakutia as they navigate the delicate balance between tradition and modernity. Against the backdrop of harsh northern landscapes, the film captures their resilience, the strength of ancestral bonds, and the challenges of sustaining a way of life under pressure from social and cultural change. At its heart is the mother, who embodies both continuity and adaptation, teaching her children along their seasonal migrations while preserving the customs passed down through generations. Offering an intimate portrayal of everyday survival, devotion, and hope, Nimer invites audiences into a world…

  • 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…

  • Avant Seriana

    Mom, you brought me back to our homeland. All I know about these harsh landscapes I learned from books written by the hand that burned these mountains. I try to undo the colonial myths engraved into my memory, but the hills escape my gaze. Do you think I, too, have become the white djinn spoken of by the legends surrounding our martyrs? Avant Seriana is an essay film shot in Super 8 in the Aurès region of Algeria. Observing the landscapes of my native land, I realize that they are divided into several images and times. Two different countries are…

  • I would like to visit

    An experimental short and installation work that combines text and film to explore the simple desire to travel, through the cultural and political realities of being Palestinian. Soundtracked with the anxiety of disposition, the work opts to show a close up of text being typed and edited on word-processing software, the work complicates a simple desire to travel by adding to it the social, cultural and political realities of being a Palestinian.

  • L’Arrière-Pays

    An autobiographical fable at the cross-section between SCI-FI and Memory Film. The film explores the journey of two dreamers trapped between Past and Present, between Dream and Reality. It combines excerpts from an immigration journal, found text and images suspended in a dystopian dark space.

  • Characters

    Hú Zhǎng Zū writes ancient Chinese poems with water on the ground in Fuxing Park, Shanghai. After a few minutes, the characters dry out and disappear. She comes to the park almost everyday and practices her handwriting with her friends and colleagues. Together they have lively discussions about the strokes and shapes – both amongst each other and with the many spectators. Hú Zhǎng Zū is the only woman within the bustling crowd of men, and due to her calligraphy skills she is respected and highly admired. I come back to see her often, in order to learn from her…

  • Flamme dans l’eau

    A film exploring the poet Franck André Jamme’s journeys to Rajasthan and Nepal to seek out the origins of Tantric paintings used to awaken heightened states of consciousness. The film merges dream and legend in an exploration of these images that are made by anonymous painters, not to be bought and sold, but as tools of inner practice, as thresholds.