Film Categories: Memory

  • meditations on a process

    An experimental documentary exploring the filmmakers’ mutual interests in spirituality, imprints of childhood, and ecologies of presence in personal filmmaking practices, bookended by poetry that situates their musings in a rapidly changing Toronto.

  • Meditation 4 Black Women

    Four women, with seemingly unrelated lives, meditate on identity setting off a mystical event that allows them to breathe again.

  • Concrete Shape

    To face your fear, you must let it enter your life as a Concrete Shape. An onsite video performance by Jesi Jordan created at the Diego Rivera Anahuacalli Museum in Mexico City. This film is made using hand made special effects and biodegradable materials such as Oaxacan clay, lava rocks, chicken eggs, cactus husks, and water.

  • One Day

    “One Day” is an experimental film that delves into the depth of a single photograph. Captured by the artist during her initial exploration of film photography in Toronto, this snapshot becomes the centerpiece of an experimental piece. The passage of six years before its development mirrors the artist’s personal journey- a journey that leads her to choose Toronto as her permanent abode after traversing Iran, Montreal, and Europe. Relocating with her family in 2009, the city’s embrace as a second home poses a poignant challenge. The haunting presence of immigrant status looms large, leaving an indelible mark on the artist’s…

  • Happy Birthday!

    Happy Birthday was created with a newly-found cassette recording from my 1970 birthday party. One hears a 16mm camera motor starting and stopping in the background as my father directs me to mark the “takes” in a 16mm film that was also found, but never developed, and whose images were consequently lost. Using the same Bolex camera that he had used, I recreated the images to accompany the found sound, a blank screen formed by morning sunlight, textured with the bubbles and scratches of hand processing in the basement barn of the Film Farm. [Originally shot at Philip Hoffman’s Independent…

  • A More Radiant Sphere

    A More Radiant Sphere tells the long-lost story of Communist poet, activist and Canadian political prisoner Joe Wallace, bringing him to life through archival material, both real and imagined. This hybrid film is shot primarily on 16mm film and weaves together the story of Wallace, the failed Canadian Communist Party, and the filmmaker’s own surprising discovery of her relation to Wallace through a distant relationship with her father (Joe’s great-nephew). Segmented throughout are folk songs based on Wallace’s writings, performed by award-winning folk musician Simone Schmidt, aka Fiver. The film delves into the limits of history and its records, and…

  • Thorn on her side

    A human narrates the story of a bad dream after buying a gorgeous plant at the market. What starts as an innocent encounter to relieve loneliness from isolation becomes a nightmarish seduction scene between a plant and its human. Together they give birth to a new creature.

  • WE DON’T TALK LIKE WE USED TO

    “Shot between Hong Kong, Japan, and the US, this short is Joshua Gen Solondz’s most ambitious work to date, a portrait of the home and the world that is dense, textured, creepy, anxious, noisy, silly, and confounding, but always tender.”-TIFF “We Don’t Talk Like We Used To” continues Joshua Gen Solondz’s loose series of addled diary films with a film that is part travelogue, part affective almanac, and part cinematic noise show. With stops in Hong Kong, New Hampshire, Japan, and Brooklyn, the film alloys obscured faces, oozing on-screen text, throbbing abstractions, solarized superimpositions, and the occasional dad joke into…

  • Currents / Perpendicolare Avanti

    Currents / Perpendicolare Avanti is a camera-less, hand-made, 16mm film collage, based on the artist’s autobiographical experience as an immigrant. In three movements, the film explores the dynamics of inhabiting the in-between space of moving between multiple countries and their temporalities, through visual and sound abstraction, interlacing and recycling pre-existing film materials and, using fragments from anonymous orphan films. Utilizing these so-called scraps, Currents is a film of extensive remediation, treated by hand through the use of the emulsion lifting technique, thereby re-imagining, re-constructing, and de-constructing the liminality of immigrant life. The re-writing of the self in Currents is produced…

  • Hoa

    Before developing her memory disorders, my grandmother Trần Thị Tuyết Hoa wrote an autobiographical book about her life and its events. The book is titled “Hồi Ức Tuyết Hoa” (Memories of Tuyết Hoa), and subtitled “Khi Đất Nước Tôi Thanh Bình: Hồi ức của một nữ sinh viên Sài Gòn” (When My Country is Peaceful: Memoirs of a Saigon Female Student). She now reads this book everyday in her Hanoi home. In the form of a poetic letter, this short film is dedicated to her, from me, a grandchild.