Film Categories: Photography

  • 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.

  • Rettet das Feuer (Rescue The Fire)

    Berlin, 1993. Photographer and artist, Jürgen Baldiga, battles HIV. In the 1990s, the AIDS epidemic reached its climax, to which no one was prepared. Infected bodies and their stories diminish, erasing their existence. Through the death of his friends and subsequently his own, Baldiga becomes the chronicler of his time: “I am taking a picture. I photograph the world. I exist.” Identity and history disappear without the persistence of memory. Until the final days of his life, Jürgen documents the exodus that seizes him. Rettet das Feuer (Rescue the Fire) directs the gaze to a piece of West Berlin history…

  • Bodyrebuilding

    How diversity work led to chronic pain and my journey to healing through weightlifting (Commissioned by Polygon Gallery)

  • Digital Evangelism

    Set in Montreal/Tiohtià:ke, where religious monuments and the remains of colonization can be found everywhere, Digital Evangelism observes technology’s increasing presence and replacement of religion in society. Juxtaposing catholic iconography, filmed on a vintage camera, with overlays of technology-themed GIFs notes how technology is worshipped, and internet usage feels like a religious experience, from AI being the all-knowing source, online figures being praised, and devoting hours a day to our phones.

  • It’s Not Brakhage

    It’s Not Brakhage is a feature-length parafiction film, structured around an unnamed narrator’s investigation of a mysterious film reel, believed to be a lost work by experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage. Shrouded in speculation and actively contested, the film reel is believed to be the sole remaining artifact from a cancelled 1959 film festival, co-organized by Brakhage and military-industrial giant DuPont chemical. The story follows the narrator’s forensic deconstruction of the film reel’s history, sifting through a patchwork of theories and speculations that have arisen since its discovery, and connecting the artifact to DuPont’s wider networks of military-industrial research and artistic…

  • The Flower and The Flood

    Following the seasonal cycle of a saffron farm based in the Fraser Valley, the film explores unmechanized labor through harvesting the delicate crocus stamen by hand. After an atmospheric river decimates the flourishing saffron crop in 2021, the flood waters temporarily return Semá:th Xó:tsa to the valley more than a century after its forced draining. The film traces the interconnected history of this sacred lake with the rebuilding of the saffron crop; cultivating community and the most expensive spice in the world. Collaborating with the saffron crocus and other plants through eco-processing and analogue processes, the family garden offers us…

  • People On Sunday

    People on Sunday is filmed using the technology of hand-crancked cinematograph camera invented by the Lumière brothers’. The instability and volatility of the image produced by the filming technique characterizes Viita´s film which title refers to the German classic Menchen am Sonntag (1930) – a well-known example of how history and the passage of time affect the interpretation of film. The inexorable passage of time and the beautiful fragility of life are central themes in both films. Does man learn anything from history, or are we doomed to make the same mistakes over and over again? People on Sunday presents…

  • Be Careful With Hope

    A poetry film based on Carol Barbour’s poem “Be Careful with Hope”, which was inspired by the Emily Dickinson poem “‘Hope’ is the Thing with Feathers.” The camera follows a woman moving through an urban nature site. She is mourning a loss and seeking to find hope again. She settles on a bench with a wide view of the surrounding landscape and opens a book that reveals a magical outcome.

  • S Division

    Toronto 2012. Sotheby’s International Realty, a division of Sotheby’s Art Auction House, promotes a lakeside condo development using Impressionist-and-Surrealist-derived imagery. The ads on hoarding, billboards, and other media are often sexist and delve into the absurd: for instance, a ballet dancer doing a tour jeté underwater amongst a school of fish. And it becomes apparent the developers considered only young white childless couples as potential clients—no humans of any other type. “An unwelcome side effect of the Avant-garde’s success was its appropriation by the “art of advertising .” For the Avant-garde could no longer be distinguished from the Avant-garde of…

  • 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.