Film Categories: Oral Histories

  • The Places We Lived

    The Places We Lived uses a large family archive of Super8 and digital home movies from the mid-1970s to late 1990s to grapple with the hopes, dreams, and disappointments of two South American immigrants who moved to Montreal in the wake of the excitement and optimism generated by Expo ’67. This story focuses on the father, Jose (“Pepe”), whose life in Canada followed four hardscrabble decades in Chile. A story about childhood and fatherhood, aging, capitalism, and obsolescence, The Places We Lived opens up new questions about class, memory, diasporic narratives, and the complicated histories of migration and exile.

  • The Day Stashi Ran Out of Honey

    An old man, a village, a potato field in bloom, and the sudden appearance of war on your doorstep. The Day Stashi Ran Out of Honey creates a haunting visual collage of kate 1930’s Poland, blending historical reality with one grandfather’s recollection of a fateful day.

  • 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.

  • The Sweater

    Historian Carolyn Steedman, in writing about her own working-class childhood, describes how, for children of working-class families, it is often the mother and not the father who embodies power. The child experiences a father who is relatively powerless in the larger social world outside the home, so that even if he is physically powerful, as my father was, he can simultaneously be perceived as a weak man. “The Sweater” blends 16mm hand processed film with found footage and video to explore childhood memories triggered by finding the last thing my deceased father gave me. Using short vignettes, I tell several…

  • 04/19/1968

    Layers of history merge with layers of media in this hybrid experimental film. An autobiographical ode to the filmmaker’s family and what’s left of their memories. A remediation collage of 16mm film, old 35mm Kodak slides and a digital computer screen. Filmed with an old DSLR camera at a specific angle in order to capture the ethereal reflections.

  • Autoritratto

    A short piece commissioned by Antimatter Media Art, a “portrait of the artist by the artist”, first exhibited as part of Automat compilation. It consists of recycled 8mm footage of Canadian landscapes, mixed materials, ink and film cement. As an immigrant, looking for, and collecting, past images of Canada is a way of imagining a past that I don’t have in this country. The re-writing of the self is produced through the archive of others via associative montage.

  • Before You Go

    A hybrid-documentary centred around a mother and daughter and their differing relationships with Iran.

  • The Way We Are

    “The Way We Are” shares excerpts of stories from audio interviews with 4 queer Asian women living in Toronto: Katherine Chun, Wenda Li, Tamai Kobayashi, and Nancy Seto. Told in the present-tense, these stories are arranged in a way that explores the past as the present, and in doing so, immersing viewers into the real-lived experiences from a different generation. This film was inspired by the intimacy of looking through a photo album with loved ones; there is something nostalgic about the materiality of handling photographs, especially in this digital era where images are so increasingly ubiquitous. The act of…

  • Tip of My Tongue

    To celebrate her 50th birthday, filmmaker Lynne Sachs gathers together other people, men and women who have lived through precisely the same years but come from places like Iran or Cuba or Australia or the Lower East Side, not Memphis, Tennessee where Sachs grew up. She invites 12 fellow New Yorkers — born across several continents in the 1960s — to spend a weekend with her making a movie. Together they discuss some of the most salient, strange and revealing moments of their lives in a brash, self-reflexive examination of the way in which uncontrollable events outside our own domestic…

  • Sermons and Sacred Pictures

    SERMONS AND SACRED PICTURES profiles Reverend L.O. Taylor, a Memphis-based Baptist minister who in the 1930s and 40s built a fiery reputation by lacing his sermons with parables, fables and dramatic visual descriptions. Taylor was also an inspired photographer and filmmaker with a keen interest in preserving a visual and aural record of the fabric of black American life. He photographed and filmed businesses and schools, the National Baptist Convention, baptisms, funerals, and individuals in the quiet dignity of their everyday lives. Over the years he compiled an extraordinary record of Southern black life before the Civil Rights movement. This…