Film Categories: Mortality

  • Passage

    A lost portrait of my brother.

  • Gulf

    This film was shot on the north shore of Cuba looking towards the Gulf of Mexico, just months before 4.9 million barrels of oil was spilled by Deepwater Horizon between April 20-July 15, 2010. Wave patterns fill the frame, tearing apart the filmstrip itself. Selected Screenings: Berwick FIlm & Media Arts Festival, 2017 (Berwick-on-Tweed, UK)

  • Last Vestiges

    Aging stripper Eddy isn’t the superstar he once was. The patrons are bored with him, his lap dance regulars are blowing him off, and he’s coping with it all by self-medicating with drugs and booze. During a night of harsh rejections, Eddy notices an elderly man staring at him from across the club. Desperate for attention and money, Eddy offers the man a dance. But once the two are alone in a private booth, things take an unexpected turn.

  • untitled (eleven years)

    A posthumous coming out film diary to my mom. Shot October 11, 1988, Bethel Memorial Park, Detroit.

  • Birthday Suit

    A remake of the seminal Canadian feminist art tape by Lisa Steele. Featuring Lexi Tronic.

  • Night Garden

    This personal short film uses a series of telephone conversations with the filmmaker’s mother as she tries to reconcile facing cancer for a fourth time. Low-fi video filmed at night captures her mothers bond to her home, shaping the tension and isolation of living life with a terminal illness. Nocturnal lush garden imagery also evokes private reflection, and in one final moment, proposes a provocative question about time.

  • Doing and undoing: poems from within #1 radiotherapy

    It deals with interventions that I had made with my mother during her cancer treatment. The film is part of large project dealing with my mother’s cancer healing process. Hacer y Deshacer: Poems from Within (2019) is an interactive video installation. Most of the video sequences show Gelis’s mother undressing, one strand of yarn at a time, sometimes in Panama’s Casco Viejo (historic district), sometimes in the turbulent waters of the Pacific. Using her mother’s body, she tells the story of a cancer survivor, the story of countless others. Gelis invites us into the healing process: the viewer can change…

  • May 35

    A haunting commemoration of the Tiananmen Square uprisings made from fragments of censored archival imagery transferred onto film using razor blades and scotch tape. “May 35” speaks to the difficulty of remembering in the absence of memory, especially when June 4 histories have been censored and obscured. It is a tribute to the thousands of lives devastated by this upheaval. Sound Design: Kadet Kuhne

  • Dear Grandpa

    Using my grandfather’s old eight-millimetre film camera, I explore the deteriorating relationship I had with my grandfather during his final days after being diagnosed with cancer.

  • The Evening Thread

    An old woman prepares to die. Accompanied by her granddaughter, she reflects on the memories of her life, and on the profound experience of being human, before taking the next step into the unknown.