Film Categories: Québec History

  • Fire and Fury

    Montreal, 1734. A tragic event forever changes the life of a slave and of the entire city. A mystery where love, secrets and betrayal collide.

  • Silvia in the Waves / Silvia dans les vagues

    Noa struggles to honor the identity of his recently deceased parent while his mother tries to uphold the appearance of a conventional family. Grief and fantasy entwine to reveal the complex relationship between history and erasure, identity and memory.

  • premièrement comme tragédie

    With a friend we play a game, negotiating sex and risk but providing only evasive deflection and questions. My friend and I negotiate with each other, I to him in French and him to me in English. We fuck. The scene plays again, simultaneously but we play the role of the other person. Him to me in French and me to him in English. We switch roles. The negotiation scene and subsequent sex act are transcribed and we learn each other’s part and switch roles. The two tapes are then layered onto each other so both scenes play out simultaneously.…

  • Expo Film (this film is my memory)

    Using anonymous home movie footage of Expo ’67 in Montreal, the artist sets out to recreate a memory that perhaps never existed. Celluloid manipulation and sound decay techniques coalesce to transform a mythic landscape into a sublime expanse of disintegrated memory. Image description: A Grainy and nostalgic image from an amusement park. A red gondola of a sky ride is in the foreground and crowds and a ferris wheel are in the background. 

  • La Montagne

    Repeated gesture of panoramic representation becomes abstraction. This film takes place on the Kondiaronk Belvedere where people come to see the Montreal skyline and its surrounding landscape.

  • A Life on the Borderlands

    This is a film about my father, who immigrated to Montreal from Chile in the early 1970s after a hard-scrabble life on the streets of Santiago as a youth. Like my mother, who immigrated from Argentina around that time, his mobile life was characterised by neither chain migration nor lasting social ties with members of his ethnic group. His story is also a story about class, politics, and complicated histories of migration and exile.

  • The Places We Lived

    The Places We Lived uses a large family archive of Super8 and digital home movies from the mid-1970s to late 1990s to grapple with the hopes, dreams, and disappointments of two South American immigrants who moved to Montreal in the wake of the excitement and optimism generated by Expo ’67. This story focuses on the father, Jose (“Pepe”), whose life in Canada followed four hardscrabble decades in Chile. A story about childhood and fatherhood, aging, capitalism, and obsolescence, The Places We Lived opens up new questions about class, memory, diasporic narratives, and the complicated histories of migration and exile.

  • Skyscraper Film

    Can I use the film strip structure as an architectural element? Is it possible to use the celluloid from the film as a cement? Can these skyscrapers be turned into something else? Can solid lines blend into sensual, natural curves? Can I melt skyscrapers? Skyscraper Film was created to try to give a visual answer to these questions, arising from the artist’s relation to urban maps of various locations and their respective skylines, populated by imposing skyscrapers and reinforced concrete panoramas: Quebec, Kingston (Canada), Maryland, Pittsburgh, Baltimore (USA) etc. Cities are presented to us as an abstract handmade camera-less collage,…

  • Motus

    Using the long take and still framing, this film evokes the movement of Montreal as a city rapidly changing through massive construction projects while also experiencing a housing crisis. Not so much a city symphony, “Motus” seeks to create a sleep-like state through abstract lines, muddy grain, and other forms of frame and shutter movement. An homage to the prog-rock scores of the Italian horror films of the 1970s, the music harkens back to the era when I discovered cinema in Montreal movie places such as the Imperial. Utilisant le long plan et le cadrage immobile, ce film évoque le…

  • Entre la langue et l’océan

    A psycho-sexual poetic politico historico and reflective film document about the Canadian identity and the failed revolution of 1837 – 1838. To understand the disease’s origins is not equivalent to finding an effective therapy, but it is undoubtedly a crucial prerequisite. Entre la Langue et L’Océan. Surréaliste, radical, esthètiquement riche et techniquement ambitieux, ceci est un film qui résiste toute classification. A man tries to invent a liberated state and ends up in a penal colony. After awhile he hesitates to remember the cause of his incarceration. He only remembers what he left behind not what he was hoping to…