Film Categories: Religion

  • Don’t Take My Joy Away

    In the Shatila Palestinian camp in Lebanon, two friends, Omar and Omar, find moments of joy amid hardship until sudden violence forces them to confront loss and survival.

  • A Flame the Colour of Air

    Medieval Catholic mystic Hildegard von Bingen reconciles the virgin/whore dichotomy in a psychedelic, erotic vision. Hildegard was known for her waking visions of the divine, her musical compositions, and her extensive medical encyclopedias. The animated imagery in this film is inspired by her surviving transcriptions, which suggest a departure from the mainstream views of her culture. In this speculative fictional tale, Hildegard has a vision in which erotic dancers appear to her as embodiments of the divine. The narration is strategically selected and collaged from Hildegard’s texts.

  • Hedge-Rider

    The Hedge-Rider sits at the boundary between the garden and the wild. She uses flying ointments to transcend her body and take flight during the night. The film attempts to capture themes around European witchcraft and altered states of consciousness.

  • huit juillets / eight julys

    This experimental documentary explores intergenerational transmission through the story of Dolorès; almost a century of women’s history and Quebec history. Through intimate audio encounters, she invites us to relive her life in a non-chronological way, revealing her victories, her regrets, but above all the feminist roots of a woman who always wanted more than she was allowed to dream for. With a fiery character, a resilience tinged with optimism and a spirit of perpetual questioning, she offers us a retrospective on the last century marked by a quest for intellectual and financial independence. The image, for its part, is a…

  • Digital Evangelism

    Set in Montreal/Tiohtià:ke, where religious monuments and the remains of colonization can be found everywhere, Digital Evangelism observes technology’s increasing presence and replacement of religion in society. Juxtaposing catholic iconography, filmed on a vintage camera, with overlays of technology-themed GIFs notes how technology is worshipped, and internet usage feels like a religious experience, from AI being the all-knowing source, online figures being praised, and devoting hours a day to our phones.

  • Potamkin

    In 1933, at age 33, Harry Alan Potamkin died of complications related to starvation, at a time when he was one of the world’s most respected film critics. In his writings, he advocated for a cinema that would simultaneously embrace the fractures and polyphony of modern life and the equitable social vision of left radical politics. This film-biography is assembled out of distorted fragments of films on which he had written, an impression of erupting consciousness. At the Odessa steps, trampling gives breath to the child. The bullet miraculously reforms the face. The Cossacks march backwards, retreating unseen into their…

  • Cairo In One Breath

    Every day, people are being replaced by machines. The adhan is a 1,400 year-old oral tradition in the process of unprecedented change in Cairo. After 60 generations, thousands of individual muezzins are being replaced by a single voice broadcast from a radio station as part of a plan of the Mubarak regime. As the Adhan Unification Project takes hold, Egypt undergoes Revolution and regime change. The film follows muezzins from when they heard rumors of the AUP through its implementation, which since 2010 has displaced thousands.

  • Luna e Santur

    “Originally commissioned as a short for Ben Coonley’s My First 3D Part 2 at Microscope Gallery, I expanded this project into what it currently is: hooded figures, violent passion, and stroboscopic tenderness brought on by a paranormal encounter I had in the summer of 2015.” –JGS ‘‘A visually assaultive threnody for losses never fully revealed and composed for monstrous times, LUNA E SANTUR mingles sex and death with the supernatural and subnaturalistic.’-Colin Beckett “Moon and sun are elliptically and stroboscopically conjured in Joshua Gen Solondz’s cloistered yet operatic Luna e Santur. In milky, hand-processed images, hooded figures recalling Magritte’s The Lovers enact a…

  • Pilgrimage (Pelerinage)

    A simple walk in the park can become a spiritual experience, a moment of discovery, a pilgrimage. This film explores the meditative nighttime allure of the Parc Lafontaine in Montreal, Canada, turning this public space into a dark sanctuary.

  • Centre of the Cyclone

    In the province of the mind there are no limits. However, in the province of the body there are definite limits not to be transcended.” John C Lilly An invocation for the transcendence between the corporal and metaphysical, the passage is guided by marooned sailors, a moment of celestial chance, demolition derbies, and a slipping into the ether