Film Categories: Portraits

  • ars memorativa

    ars memorativa is an experimental documentary in four chapters that examines what is left behind when someone passes away and how memory traces emerge from the remaining artifacts and memories. the four people intersected with the directors life in a variety of ways and their stories are shared in a mix of forms: hand processed celluloid, digital animation, audio interview and home movies.

  • Former Models

    A public and private history undo themself(ves) as they mutually encounter the trials of Labor, Love, Loss and Planned Obsolescence. A body desires its Other: a simulation is transgressed and the ultimate price is paid- “No-body is above The Law.” In this docu-narrative, the tragic story of Milli Vanilli’s Robert Pilatus and his descent into a post-racial and post-gendered pure image is told through appropriated video footage. A fabricated narrative conceived by the artist collides with Pilatus’ public biography in a technologically mediated flash of desire and information. This video is dedicated to the very real life of Robert Pilatus, 1965-1998.  

  • DP2

    DP2 is the restored version of the film DP (Displaced Person), originally released in 1982. Uniquely melding documentary and contemporary performance art, DP2 is based on the reminiscences of a displaced Ukrainian who spent most of World War II in Nazi Germany and miraculously survived forced labour, concentration camp internment, and near-deportation to Siberia. Intercut with the narrative are dynamic movement sequences shot in a vast glass and marble structure, choreographed and performed by Lily Eng (Canadian Spotlight Artist, Reel Asian International Film Festival, 2011). Eng’s action sequences expand the intellectual and emotional resonances of the narrative, and vice versa. Her…

  • 100 Crushes Chapter 6: They

    “The director’s feelings of envy and resentment of a roommate’s pronoun-of-choice eventually evolve into delight in one simple word. This freedom allows for new embodiments of gender—as beautiful and strange as a unicorn, a pair of wings or a bouquet of roses.” — Inside Out 2014 Toronto LGBT Film Festival

  • Change Over Time

    Change Over Time is an animated, experimental, personal documentary about the filmmaker’s first year on testosterone from an impressionistic and poetic perspective. The filmmaker asks himself the questions, what kind of man will I become? What emotional and soul changes will I experience during this time? The result is a distilled, evocative poem of Ewan’s musings on loss, love, and change through the use of stop-motion and digital animation, still photography, and time-lapse cinematography. Change Over Time will leave viewers with the wave of the filmmaker’s experiences washing over them.

  • Geriatrica

    Geriatrica is a diminished landscape, both physical and mental. 90-year-old Maria pushes a medical walker down a nursing home corridor. A camera strapped to the walker tracks her movements. She was once a world traveler, but now the corridor defines the extent of her universe. Maria manages information like an exhausted swimmer treading water, grasping at the same few thoughts endlessly, never getting anywhere. All information is new, then rapidly sinks out of sight. Maria wants to die, but is no longer capable of doing anything about it. Geriatrica is about being lost forever in the now.

  • Slaughterhouse

    This multi-framed work weaves several inter-connected threads of loss: of land and agriculture, of property and business, through political, social, economic and environmental slaughter. The materials in this archive are gleaned from public and personal sources such as the National Archive of Canada, in the story of a nineteenth century aboriginal woman and land rights activist Nahnebahwequay (1824-65) and more recently organic farmer Michael Schmidt, from excerpts of the Farmer’s Advocate and Family Herald publications 1958-1968, also a trip into the artist’s familial past, and the rise and fall of his family’s slaughterhouse and pork processing plant, Hoffman Meats (1951-81),…

  • Aged

    Aged is an experimental documentary about the relationship between aging and corporeal perception. From 2005 -2011, along with my sisters, I was a caregiver for my father, during his swift movement into old age. Over this period I maintained a practice of diaristic sketching using film, video and sound, and through this process I collected a significant archive of intimate moments, at the summer cottage, where my father chose to die. This raw material has been worked and reworked through various modes of digital and filmic manipulation. Ultimately Aged uncovers the common process of aging, the cinematic elements acting as…

  • Holy Mother My Mother

    A portrait of motherhood filmed during the Navratri celebrations (The Goddess Festival) in India.

  • Bikini

    What happens if after a decade you return to the same beach – only to find that you never left? You look around and see the same waves of bodies and boys, the same sky, the same open sea… the same feeling of dread. Bikini is an atomic beach party film – a reaction to dating apps, body issues, and a fear the sun. It’s a world where even the dreamer can’t catch a break, let alone a wave. We’re all at odds with “the muscles”, and everyone has an opinion about what to live for. The men keep rolling…