Film Categories: Mortality

  • assia

    A sick child talks about her illness while watching strange images of a life she feels she has never lived.

  • peugeot pulmonaire

    The east of France is dying, we see a half-empty factory and a mass of workers caught between precariousness and impotence. X-rays of their calcified lungs scroll by at the rhythm of a mechanical press under which one suffocates.

  • A Nice Big Zero for You

    Doughnut destruction that started as a lark but got a bit grim. Also an ode to the JK Optical Printer, and a meditation on human cruelty and expendability.

  • Delight at Robert St

    Buddy, an old stray cat from Toronto, had managed to conquer a small territory of his own in the center of the city. The filmmaker met Buddy’s gaze every time she went out, she befriended her neighbor and captured his last fall with her old 35mm hand cranked movie camera.

  • Contents under Pressure

    An anxious young party-goer finds love at a party, but after committing a party faux pas, is destroyed in a washing machine accident. From here, the project pivots, self-conscious and needing to recast its hero, who quickly has an existential crisis (“what’s my motivation?”). A poetic, quirky, singular meditation on identity and personal history, populated with the beautiful vistas of Atlantic Canada.

  • A Life on the Borderlands

    This is a film about my father, who immigrated to Montreal from Chile in the early 1970s after a hard-scrabble life on the streets of Santiago as a youth. Like my mother, who immigrated from Argentina around that time, his mobile life was characterised by neither chain migration nor lasting social ties with members of his ethnic group. His story is also a story about class, politics, and complicated histories of migration and exile.

  • Green and Red, But Terracotta Red

    We are looking through the mirror of time, into distorted memories, while several narrators tell us about the most vivid colours in their dreams. The film consists of a collage of 16mm found footage that I further processed and decayed using a gentle combination of bleaching techniques. This process allowed me to partially lift the emulsion from the film base and re-shift it and re-position it by hand. Faces are warped, homes collapse, memories fade and blur.

  • Vienna

    A meditation on timeless landscapes and the transience of vision.

  • THINK BEFORE YOU THINK: A PORTRAIT OF RICK RAXLEN

    Think Before You Think is a portrait of film poet, animator and artist Rick Raxlen. Shot on 16mm film and digital video at his Victoria, BC home and studio over the course of a year, the film follows Raxlen’s daily practice, uncovering the rituals and gestures of a creative process. Mining the highly specific and personal nature of this life-sized project, excerpts from Raxlen’s films, drawings, paintings and mark-making from a 50+ year art practice combine with hand-processed and manipulated film materials to play off the rites and relaxed rigour of his unique approach to making a life. “Perfectly captures…

  • I Must Be Going

    A young finger puppet retrieves a letter left behind by her recently deceased brother.