Film Categories: Politics + Policy

  • Vertières I, II, III

    The Vertières battle was the last battle before Napoleon’s army withdrew from Haiti, which became the first independent nation in Latin America and the Caribbean. Botkay presents three filmic incursions into the Haitian historical, social and political process. Exploring aspects such as discipline/control, nature/tenderness and the ruin/resistance. this piece investigates the levels of domestication and enslavement resulting from the post-colonial processes that marked the history of the country. This film was selected by Nicole Brenez on the 10 best films 2015 list in Artforum.

  • Clear and No Screws

    Clear and No Screws profiles SendAPackage, a wholesale warehouse founded by ex-prisoner Chris Barrett where all of the items sold meet the 36-page list of rules regulating packages allowed into the New York prison system. From pattern-less boxer shorts to hip hop cassette tapes specially produced for New York State’s 54,000 prisoners, Clear and No Screws offers a tender glimpse into life in prison through the circulation of regulated goods.

  • A Film, Reclaimed

    Produced with the support of Anna Sanders and École d’Arts Politiques (SPEAP) Paris. The ecologic crisis is a political, economic and social crisis. It is also cinematographic, as cinema coincides historically and in a critical and descriptive way with the development of the Anthropocene. A Film, Reclaimed is a conversation, an essay that reads the terrestrial crisis under the influence and with the help of the beautiful and terrible films which have accompanied it.

  • Castles On The Ground

    Buildings rise from the rubble, defying gravity to re-imagine their fate and the possibility of affordable housing for all.

  • Queer Ecologies

    Queer Ecologies is a diary style, video text piece, made up of one or two sentence installments. Instead of addressing “Dear Diary,” or God, the writer directs her internal musings to a Mushroom, or the larger organism that a mushroom springs from, a Mycelium. While the writer expresses her personal struggles and misgivings about the human condition, she compares her experiences to the supernatural life of the mushroom species. The language is both scientific and poetic.

  • Festival of Light

    A record of illumination on the darkest night of the year, during an annual celebration held in Kensington Market, Toronto.

  • lay claim to an island

    Texts from the 1969 American Indian Occupation of Alcatraz and letters from supporters propel an exploration of political yearning, emancipatory architecture and failed utopias. What does it mean to claim land that has more value as a symbol than as a potential home? And how does that symbol function beyond the boundaries of its geographic limits?

  • White Condo

    In this hyper-real age of simulated imagery and self-curated surveillance, many artists are returning to metaphors of authenticity and duplication to investigate the particular character of this post-millennial moment. Theorists like Virilio have interrogated the ways in which contemporary seeing modifies experience, encouraging the extreme desire for other worlds and, essentially, for disappearance itself. White Condo is my ironic attempt to contribute to this complex terrain, a satiric project for exploring the myriad dysfunctional ways that we humans attempt to ‘master’ ourselves and our increasingly artificial environments.

  • Cairo In One Breath

    Every day, people are being replaced by machines. The adhan is a 1,400 year-old oral tradition in the process of unprecedented change in Cairo. After 60 generations, thousands of individual muezzins are being replaced by a single voice broadcast from a radio station as part of a plan of the Mubarak regime. As the Adhan Unification Project takes hold, Egypt undergoes Revolution and regime change. The film follows muezzins from when they heard rumors of the AUP through its implementation, which since 2010 has displaced thousands.

  • Between The Bullet and The Hole

    ‘Between the Bullet and the Hole’ is a film centred on the elusive and complex effects of war on women’s role in ballistic research and early computing. The film features new and archival high-speed bullet photography, schlieren and electric spark imagery, bullet sound wave imagery, forensic ballistic photography, slide rulers, punch cards, computer diagrams, and a soundtrack by Scanner. Like a frantic animation storyboard, it explores the flickering space between the frames, testing the perceptual mechanics of visual interpolation, the possibility of reading or deciphering the gap between before and after. Interpolation – the main task of the women studying…