Film Categories: Mortality

  • Aunt Harriet

    Aunt Harriet is a meditative moving portrait exploring introspection, healing, and aging. Set against the backdrop of rural Ontario it deepens the memory of Black lives, bridging past and present – history and myth.

  • Blood Like Water

    Shadi embarks on a secret adventure, and accidentally drags his family into a trap where they only have two choices; either collaborate with the Israeli occupation, or be shamed and humiliated by their own people.

  • A Canadian Ghost Story: The Quilt for Joyce Wieland

    A Canadian Ghost Story: The Quilt for Joyce Wieland is a tribute to the films and other artwork of the late Joyce Wieland. It comprises a series of vignettes, each referencing the title of one of her films and picking up themes and motifs from her work. Two characters, A and B, are engaged in a somewhat mysterious and arduous endeavour surrounding Wieland’s films. Their memories of Wieland are stitched into a tale that is being told in a time of uncertainty and looming danger. The piece explores artistic legacy, particularly in a feminist and Canadian context, with some of…

  • 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.

  • back home

    back home follows filmmaker, Nisha Platzer’s pursuit to get to know her older brother, Josh, twenty years after he took his own life. As she connects with the friends who knew him best as a teen, a complex portrait emerges. Through intimate recollections re-imagined on Super8 and 16mm film, and lyrical images hand-processed with plants, seaweed, soil and ashes, ‘back home’ floats between memory and present time in a fragmented meditation on identity, grief and loss: illuminating the transformative power of healing in community.

  • Dark Star Entropy

    A black hole, first thought to be “dark stars” that we couldn’t see, are the most powerful objects in existence which bends light, time and reality to its will. Dark Star Entropy is a handcrafted on 35mm film made to be a short meditation on the impossibility of truly being able to comprehend on an intuitive level these galactic behemoths.

  • longer than that, she said

    A meditation on anticipatory loss, this film examines the artists relationship with grief and attempts to ground herself. This film was hand processed in cilantro, mint and tansy at the Film Farm Residency hosted by Phillip Hoffman. Dyed in turmeric and walnut and utilizing freezing film decay techniques.

  • Vanilla

    Vanilla takes you through the everyday ordinary life of a disabled senior citizen living in Ottawa, Canada. It is a portrait documenting aging and the loneliness of those suffering in silence. The black and white film was shot on 16mm Bolex film camera using a KODAK 7222 Double-X Negative film. Processed by Niagara Film Lab (Toronto). Created as part of Independent Filmmakers Co-operative of Ottawa (IFCO) – Dogme Production Challenge.

  • The Propagation of Uncertainty

    Emily DiCarlo’s three-channel video installation The Propagation of Uncertainty (2020) explores the friction that occurs between, what she termed, “the infrastructure of time with the intimacy of duration.” The work focuses on time frequency standards and how our accelerated, networked world relies on the foundation of Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). With airports, stock markets and telecommunications operating through precise temporal orchestration, UTC reigns authoritatively omnipresent, but in actuality, is anything but absolute. Through a month-long “post-real time” process, collected asynchronous data from 82 master atomic clocks around the world is reckoned at the International Bureau for Weights and Measures (BIPM)…

  • The Danse Macabre

    A graveyard dance party.