Film Categories: Portraits

  • Boardwalk Músico

    A young trombone player from eastern Cuba, Liuber Martínez, came to Havana to make it as a musician. With Havana’s iconic seaside boardwalk as his practice studio, Liuber plays his heart out every day and dreams of touring the world.

  • Mino-bimaadiziwin (The Good Life)

    Mino-bimaadiziwin (The Good Life) came out of the Artist for Film residency at Artscape Gibraltar Point. I was excited about First Story’s walking tour with Elder Carolyn King. I was only able to participate with the aid of a wheelchair and allow others to push me around, it was my first time in a wheelchair. I documented this walk from that perspective with this manual timelapse on Super 8. Reconciling myself as a mixed-race indigenous Colombian settler “walking the red road” while being a person who lives with physical disabilities. Learning to live mino-bimaadiziwin as a settler to Turtle Island…

  • Sum (Heart)

    Based on ideas of Zen Buddhism and rooted in the 7 Grandfather teachings, Sum (Heart) is a rumination on death, grief and letting go. Starting out as a visual mourning song to Wendy Babcock, Mr Toqui Wong and Jack, empty landscapes represent the yearning for the company of dead friends. Water becomes a metaphor for grief and mourning, the ebbs and flows of nature reminds us of the cycle of life which transforms into a stark ode to a new day and new beginnings. I put all my sadness, prayers and hope into this trilogy while still aching for their…

  • The Burning Desire in a Dollar Bill

    The Burning Desire in a Dollar Bill shows how the special interests of media conglomerates and their parent companies mould our latent desires at a young age, later leaving us confused as to whether we are lusting after the sexually charged imagery or the products being advertised. The film argues that the act of purchasing is the strongest aphrodisiac in a capitalist society, leaving open the possibility that a solution to toppling capitalism is to shift our sexual desires from consumerism to personal freedom from the state. The film was created during a residency at Signal Culture using a modified…

  • FOREIGN QUARTERS

    My mother’s lost Chinese heritage was a point of departure in this film which investigates the process by which an image is constructed in places foreign from that of my own. The condition of distance genetic to the ethnographic image traces the elusive qualities of her past and persona.

  • Exilic Trilogy

    “Exilic Trilogy” consists of three arthouse docudrama films from Arsalan Baraheni, the exiled Iranian-Canadian filmmaker based in Toronto. The films present a well known musician, a painter and a poet. The films are biographical, poetic and musical, colliding with social, political and philosophical manifestations. The first film is called “Light and Sound”, starring Soleyman Vaseghi, a well known Iranian musician who was forced to leave Iran after the 1979 revolution when music got banned by the regime. The film is about the light within the mind of the artist and the sound which he produces through his music in exile.…

  • Arvind

    After his mentally ill mother is released from prison, Arvind, a 16 year-old biracial queer teenager in Austin, Texas, revisits old family wounds when he writes and produces a play written from his mother’s perspective. When his relationship with the actress who portrays his mother on stage deepens, it sets Arvind on a course that will change his perception of his past.

  • Untitled (Horse)

    A symbiotic collaboration in movie motion. The logic and order intended by Muybridge are destroyed as a means to examine the sublime qualities of the cinema.

  • The Queen of Material

    A short procession of colorful material and a mysterious woman lit by the sun. A paean to Kenneth Anger.

  • If I Were Any Further Away I’d Be Closer to Home

    A silent poem reflecting on the place of my mother’s birth and her first traces on earth. A generational portrait of South Asian “makers” becomes a perceptual voyage into memory, experience, and touch.