Film Categories: Portraits

  • My Father, Francis

    My Father, Francis: a father and daughter collaborate. A comment on kinship, diasporic labour, devotion and the factory as a site of creativity.

  • DOH! OH DEAR, A FEMALE TEAR!

    Using the voice as a metaphor for political voice, Stephen Chen traces his journey as a male mezzo, faced with prejudice and marginalization back in Singapore, and later in North America. The schooling and suppression of his voice becomes interwoven with his experiences of colonialism and exile. Playing with the biography documentary form, DOH! OH DEAR, A FEMALE TEAR! brackets issues of voice / gender / representation as Stephen traces his westernization, the discovery and silencing of his voice, and people’s reactions in Singapore and North America. Reflecting on the “unsettling” quality of his voice, Stephen decided to exploit the…

  • Finding a Place to Sleep

    Based on stories my grandmother told me, I re-imagine while working as a cleaner the experiences of my ancestors during the Holodomor (forced famine) in Ukraine during the Stalinist-Soviet era. The “film” image is re-invented through digital video to enact a sense of ambiguity between authenticity and fiction, as can also be present in the act of oral storytelling. This is one chapter in “Stories for a Future Generation,” a series of shorts which together tell the stories of my family’s and my own migrations, and the inter-generational impacts of those upon our lives and on those of our family’s…

  • The Weight of Snow

    A home movie of a trip to Chernobyl, a dying matriarch and a set of troubling personal circumstances, The Weight of Snow is an essay documenting memory, time and place. A film referencing the tradition of personal travelogue films of The Escarpment School and the essay style of Sans Soleil, The Weight of Snow travels from Canada to Chernobyl from the perspective of a young man exploring radiation in the midst of death, cancer and emotional turmoil. A collection of all techniques used throughout the Lion series, The Weight of Snow is the centerpiece of the work. Echoing the collage…

  • Endangered

    Barbara Hammer’s face appears through layered printing and physically scratched film. The material of the film itself – inevitably changed by photochemical decay over time – and its images are at risk of loss as surely as the endangered animal species depicted in the film. The romantic concern with nature is elaborated with a technically sophisticated metaphor from industrial processes. With her own image appearing with the animals, perhaps the artist too is at risk of being lost.

  • Forever

    Part dream, part documentary, Forever weaves history and hedonism to form a world of dandelions, hypnosis, bicycles and memory. Created from experiments replicating the effects of radiation on film, the piece explores the nature of airborne radioactivity and brings us from a woman’s story of adolescence, to a bicycle race, to life in the Soviet Union. A bricolage of pop culture and personal histories, Forever is about looking for dandelions and finding atoms. As the opening film of Lion, Forever employs spray and smudge techniques to explore the concept of airborne radioactive contaminants and how they travel in open air.…

  • Sodium Lamp Study

    A technical experiment about exposure and an interview of a woman’s experience with radioactive ablation therapy for thyroid cancer, Sodium Lamp Study is a meditation on exposure, treatment, and the unseen emotional effects of radiation. The visual element of Sodium Lamp Study explores the photographic concept of reciprocity failure – when the exposure of an image is separated in to multiple exposures rather than a single exposure with the same light strength, the results become unreliable. In a similar way, patients facing the treatment of thyroid cancer are presented with an option of a single dose of radioactive iodine, or…

  • Dust

    Referencing Yayoi Kusama’s concept of self-obliteration, Dust is a memory document, a self-portrait in a moment one prefers to forget. Using techniques to erase portions of the image, the film is a mutating, disintegrating echo of the biblical references in The Weight of Snow. Dust references genesis; we are dust, and to dust we return. The full-length version of the Lion series is available through the CFMDC.

  • Lion

    A project spanning three years of production and research, Lion explores the Chernobyl disaster and the nature of radiation, recollection, and personal history. Lion navigates atomic fallout and a girl’s adolescence, a dream before death, radiation as a cause and a cure for cancer, masculine bravado, feminine obsession, a trip to Chernobyl amidst the death of a matriarch, and the destruction of memory. This conceptually arranged film album is composed of seven works on 16mm and hand processed with darkroom techniques that mimic the effects of radiation on film. The series combines memory, history, pop culture and technical experiments to create visual representations…

  • Shamans, the Cunning

    Referencing mythology and gothic fiction, Shamans, the Cunning is about surviving in evil times. Here, human identity turns fluid and the borderline between human and animal evaporates. Shamans evokes its themes via drama and choreographed movement.