Film Categories: Mortality

  • I’ve Heard a Siren Calling

    A Great Lake Surfer has recently began her transition as a Trans Woman. She now is having hesitations with putting her wetsuit back on, but something is calling her back. In the isolation of her cabin in a small fishing town, she seeks to find the courage to face her fears.

  • Lior

    Lior, an elderly man recovering from a stroke, approaches his home-care doctor with the possibility of an assisted death.

  • 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.

  • Self-Portrait in Hell

    Self-Portrait in Hell is a hybrid film that combines analog and digital film manipulation techniques. Multiple layers of 8mm films and disparate fragments are amalgamated to create a self-portrait of the director. A singular self-portrait, since ironically the subject of the film is not the director but the image found in abandoned film archives, the image of another, unknown woman. The first layer is from a 1970s 8mm home movie titled Woman Dancing with Dog and was found in an antique shop. The second layer is an 8mm film belonging to an unknown archive, which the artist buried for a…

  • 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.

  • Meditation 4 Black Women

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

  • Radius

    From my perspective any place can be seen as sacred. I believe you can become so familiar with a place that you can feel the sacred in every aspect of its land, air and water. The more familiar I become with a place the more I tend to fall in love with it and in turn many of its truths are revealed. On March 31, 2022 my life partner Cheryl passed away in hospice. In April I decided to make a pilgrimage to places near our house where we enjoyed taking walks after moving to the village in October of…

  • Over the Island

    On the island of Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, the act of leaving has become ingrained into the culture. Since the closure of its main industries, the Glace Bay coal mine and the Sydney steel plant, many young families have been forced to relocate, migrating thousands of miles in the pursuit of work. ‘Over the Island’ is an experimental documentary that follows a mother traveling back home to the island, and a filmmaker attempting to connect the past with the present. This film deconstructs the concept of ‘home’, and investigates how one’s sense of belonging, self identification and familial relationship are…

  • Matin Dans Une Foret de Pins (Morning in the Pine Forest)

    The lives of six young people unfold in a journey through different worlds revealed and interwoven, where the boundaries between documentary and fiction, reality and dream cease to exist. The volatile and seductive landscape of urban and rural Latvia was treated as a rich context for the complex relationships one has with the world – inviting the viewer to come upon the questions that bind us in our common need to understand our humanness. This film is based on the lives of HELENA, EVA, JANKA, GUNTIS, ANNA and GALC.

  • The Promise

    Set in an open field, the two men dance, jumping from reality to dream, as they follow a path, a metaphor for structure in their pursuits, giving meaning to their struggles.