Film Categories: Language

  • 6500

    The color temperature of different light sources is measured in Kelvin. 6500 Kelvin corresponds to the value of overcast daylight and is used as a standard for the neutral registration of white surfaces. Unconsciously the human eye adapts to different light conditions, while cameras need adjustment through white balance. 6500 is a short video essay on the relativity of words, questioning the application of absolute values in an argument, visualized through a play on colors, their spaces, and their highly subjective perception. Quotes from Ludwig Wittgenstein’s “Remarks on Colour” emphasize this rhythmic flickering and slightly absurd conversation between colour and…

  • Soup For My Brother

    “In this strikingly poetic documentary about memory, loss and brotherly love, we find Jimmy, guided by the memory and words of his grandfather, preparing a soup for his beloved brother Danny, who passed away one year ago.” — imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival (2016) Image description: Two hands holding old photos as someone looks at them. On top is a black-and-white headshot of an Indigenous boy, smiling and looking sharp in a checked shirt. Below is a colour photo of three older Indigenous women posing in a yard or field.

  • Sound Seam

    ‘Sound Seam’ is a film which gives voice to the idea that every surface, in particular parts of our anatomy, is potentially inscribed with an unheard sound or echoes of voices from the past. The soundtrack’s musical composition is interlaced with a voice-over which draws on Rainer Maria Rilke’s text ‘Primal Sound’, where he reflects on the possibility of playing the coronal suture of a skull with a gramophone needle. The overlapping voices of the narratives tell a forensic love story of yearning, encryption, inscription, decoding, memory and erasure. The film uses microscopic photography, scanning electron microscopy, and sounds of…

  • Oramics: Atlantis Anew

    ‘Oramics: Atlantis Anew’ is conceived of as an artist’s film in homage to Daphne Oram, the pioneer of British Electronic Music and co-founder of the BBC Radiophonic workshop in 1958. The film features a close-up encounter with her unique invention, the Oramics Machine, housed at the Science Museum in London.
Oram used drawn sound principles to compose ‘handwrought’electronic music, and yet the visual nature of her work remains largely unseen and unsung. The film brings this obsolete technological fantasy briefly to back to life, enabling the visualisation of the drawn sound material, re-interpreting and translating it into new filmic sequences. The…

  • A Kiki with Bobby Bowen

    This short documentary-style interview film takes a quick look at some key terms that originated within queer Black and POC communities (such as the ballroom scene), tracing their cultural significance to contemporary mainstream popular culture.

  • Toad, Leaf, Grass, Rock

    A 16mm hybrid visual poem, at the crossroad between intertextuality and documentary. This film “plays” with images in an enigmatic way. Weaving, in the words of Eugenio Montale, a disappearing and deserted suburban landscape into the fabric of images, sounds, and textures of two far away lovers yearning for each other.

  • Before You Go

    A hybrid-documentary centred around a mother and daughter and their differing relationships with Iran.

  • Your Day is My Night

    This provocative hybrid documentary reveals the stories of a Chinatown “shift-bed” apartment through dreams, movement and song. A shift-bed is a domestic space shared by people who are neither in the same family nor in a relationship. Simply put, itʼs an economic necessity brought on by the challenges of urban existence.  In “Your Day is My Night” these beds transform into a stage, illuminating the collective history of Chinese immigration through conversations, autobiographical monologues, and theatrical improvisations.  The film was shot on 16mm, Super 8 and HD video in the kitchens, bedrooms, wedding halls, cafés, and mahjong parlors of New…

  • The Task of the Translator

    Lynne Sachs pays homage to Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Task of the Translator” through three studies of the human body. First, she listens to the musings of a wartime doctor grappling with the task of a kind-of cosmetic surgery for corpses. Second, she witnesses a group of Classics scholars confronted with the haunting yet whimsical task of translating a newspaper article on Iraqi burial rituals into Latin. And finally, she turns to a radio news report on human remains. “In “The Task of the Translator,” Lynne Sachs turns her original, probing eye to the ways in which we struggle to…

  • Wind In Our Hair

    Inspired by the stories of Argentine writer Julio Cortázar, yet blended with the realities of contemporary Argentina, “Wind in Our Hair” is an experimental narrative directed by New York filmmaker Lynne Sachs about four girls discovering themselves through a fascination with the trains that pass by their house. A story of early-teen anticipation and disappointment, “Wind in Our Hair” is circumscribed by a period of profound Argentine political and social unrest. Shot with 16mm, Super 8mm, Regular 8mm film and video, the film follows the girls to the train tracks, into kitchens, on sidewalks, in costume stores, and into backyards…