Film Categories: Portraits

  • Matin Dans Une Foret de Pins (Morning in the Pine Forest)

    The lives of six young people unfold in a journey through different worlds revealed and interwoven, where the boundaries between documentary and fiction, reality and dream cease to exist. The volatile and seductive landscape of urban and rural Latvia was treated as a rich context for the complex relationships one has with the world – inviting the viewer to come upon the questions that bind us in our common need to understand our humanness. This film is based on the lives of HELENA, EVA, JANKA, GUNTIS, ANNA and GALC.

  • Hammu

    Hammu is the name of the hamster I had as a child. It seemed it was my only friend and being to identify with. One day it disappeared from the cage and was never to be seen again; that event marked the end of my childhood, of unreserved trust and commitment. The work is a visualization of memories I have about the event ,of obsessions, tediousness, and loss. (SV)

  • Gags N’ Gals: Male Order

    A short experimental film inspired by the paintings of biblical women from German Renaissance painter, Lucas Cranach. The film reimagines Cranach’s paintings through a modern, critical lens, exploring female sensuality and their ability to use it as their own personal weapons.

  • Meditation 4 Black Women

    Four women, with seemingly unrelated lives, meditate on identity setting off a mystical event that allows them to breathe again.

  • Self-Portrait in Hell

    Self-Portrait in Hell is a hybrid film that combines analog and digital film manipulation techniques. Multiple layers of 8mm films and disparate fragments are amalgamated to create a self-portrait of the director. A singular self-portrait, since ironically the subject of the film is not the director but the image found in abandoned film archives, the image of another, unknown woman. The first layer is from a 1970s 8mm home movie titled Woman Dancing with Dog and was found in an antique shop. The second layer is an 8mm film belonging to an unknown archive, which the artist buried for a…

  • Wisemen, God, and Wednesday

    Within three diverse pairs of eyes are born three souls that converge. Samwise and Stevie grew up homeless in BC and Nova Scotia. Ianos is a gender-queer Greek. Kwaku is a single father who came from extreme poverty and famine. Featuring a juxtaposition of sound and imagery, “Wisemen, God, and Wednesday” is a sketch of these characters’ intimate commentaries on life as they see it.

  • xīn nī 廖芯妮

    xīn nī 廖芯妮 (“understanding you”) is an intimate auto-ethnographic portrait expressed through dance and digital technologies. Liaw engages in intergenerational conversations with her family and community to transform the linguistic divide between her Chinese name and its Hakka translation into a space for healing. Drawing on themes of decolonizing queerness to emphasize self-love and self-curiosity, the work explores both physical and technological attachments. Bodies made up of 3D-rendered cultural objects hold space for the stories of Liaw’s elders, while expanding the growing web of her ancestral knowledge. 

  • Sultana’s reign

    Sultana of New York is a Palestinian drag queen, performer, and artist. “Sultana’s Rein” opens with a conversation with Sultana, as she is being painted by Jordanian artist, RIDIKKULUZ. Reflecting on her journey from Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon, to then New York, Sultana tells of the challenges of performing drag in conservative societies, her nostalgia for the glory days and the glamour of Egyptian cinema icons, and her struggle to prove her existence and her self-expression as a performer and artist. She also shares her love of celebration and her everlasting commitment to be true to herself.

  • Marrow of my Bones

    Marrow of my Bones is a short experimental film that has been created through a mixture of digital special effects, compositing, frame by frame animation, and 16mm hand processed film. Through material-based exploration, this film plays with the concept of post-humanism via the return to nature and the body in a tactile and gritty manner. The score is an electroacoustic soundscape, a playful mixture of voice, analog synthesizers, and field recordings of foraged sounds such as insects, wind, and fire. These sounds were then processed through hardware effects such as low-pass filters, reverb & delay. The soundscape is a mixture…

  • Bodyrebuilding

    How diversity work led to chronic pain and my journey to healing through weightlifting (Commissioned by Polygon Gallery)