Film Categories: Portraits

  • Carasoul: a Portrait in Nth Dimensions

    Carasoul: a Portrait in Nth Dimensions is an animated surrealist 4K film. The film depicts temporal, immaterial sensations and perceptions as spatially material extensions of the body. This vision of invisible dimensions within a human experience is grounded in biological and biographical forms. This work is for feeling thoughts around you like waves and forms, invisible yet tangible. One named experience is the Carasoul, the head-soul moving like a merry-go-round. It’s the imagination, the mind’s eye, the visuospatial sketchpad of the psyche surrounding the body. The Carasoul questions how one experiences time, the location and duration of consciousness, the life…

  • Tell Me about SunTea

    Tell Me about SunTea (Super 8, Digital Video, Colour, Stereo Sound, 6 minutes and 47 seconds) Tell Me about SunTea builds a conversational and spatial ecosystem, weaving together the disparate spaces of the Toronto Islands and Covington, Texas. The film considers the life cycles of plants and animals, as discussed by the filmmaker’s Gram and as remembered by the filmmaker. Conversational obstacles and a failed interview attempt are re-imagined as off-road opportunities. The repeated voice over reveals changes in cadence and content that point to the fragile intimacy held in language and storytelling. “Considering different forms of mechanical and organic…

  • The Birth of a Beautiful Butch

    “The Birth of a Beautiful Butch” is a story about Alex, a gay high school senior, caught between who she is and what she’s supposed to be. On the day of her school pictures, Alex feels struck with an appearance that doesn’t fit right with her body. When she retreats into her mind, she is able to imagine the person she wants to be. Ultimately, she transcends the judgement of others through fashion in an authentic expression of herself.

  • Atomkraftwerk Zwentendorf

    Forty years ago Austrians voted against opening a nuclear power plant that had already been built. Atomkraftwerk Zwentendorf is a monument to the power of public protest and the potential of a democratic vote. After catastrophic flooding across Europe, Hope Tucker visited the nuclear power plant outside of Vienna that would have been powered by the same model reactor as Fukushima. Atomkraftwerk Zwentendorf has an edit structure based on the chain of action in a boiling water reactor power plant and the path of protest that kept this plant from opening. Sound design incorporates a recording of the Tohoku earthquake.

  • Grace of God, The

    A dark yet humorous psychological journey about the filmmaker’s efforts to reconcile his socially awkward and sexually naive past with his mature present. Putting himself in front of and behind the camera, L’Ecuyer has forged a stunning hybrid of fiction and documentary. “The Grace of God” crackles and gleams with L’Ecuyer’s aesthetic innovations and his impressive gifts for story telling and directing. “The Grace of God” is a labour of love, comprised of scenes gathered sporadically over a ten-year period. The resulting stream-of-consciousness film takes us on a metaphoric train ride home that slowly reveals the time-worn truth that moving…

  • The Magical Quality of Armpits

    A silent foray into the most underappreciated part of the body.

  • Grand Opera

    “Grand Opera” marks a stock-taking of Benning’s work and his life, presenting a personal and artistic autobiography woven together with a series of events dealing with the historical development of the number pi, Benning’s travels, and homages to Michael Snow, Hollis Frampton, George Landow (Owen Land), and Yvonne Rainer. “Before making films on a full-time basis several years ago, [Benning] taught math to high school drop-outs in an alternative school. Most of those enrolled were alcoholics, so he brought in empty liquor, beer, and wine bottles. Together they worked out comparative pricing based on the percentage of alcohol versus the…

  • séance

    In this piece, I attempted to switch between the persona of a settler woman and myself speaking on postcolonialism. I do this by taking my costume on and off. “Occupying the bodies of notable female figures from Peterborough’s history, Calla Durose Moya stages a conversation with the past in order to come to terms with her identity in the present. With volunteer and employment experience in local heritage institutions, Durose Moya has observed first-hand the limits imposed by the colonial lens with regard to a routinely prejudiced and biased version of history. Appropriating the images of settler women for her…

  • How amazingly unlikely is your birth

    What could a cosmology of one person’s life look like? A daughter examines the life and premature death of her father, who had a troubled relationship with the psychiatric medical establishment and was passionate about ecology, politics and space travel.

  • Let Love Be Love In Me

    Inhaling love and submersing into peace, created in collaboration with Mother Earth.