Film Categories: Resistance

  • Jaddoland

    A visit to my mother’s home art studio in Texas prompts a deeper exploration into the meaning of home across generations and landscapes.

  • Resistance Meditation

    A meditation on crip time and resistance by a chronically ill filmmaker, shot on Super 8 and (mostly) eco-processed by hand.

  • FIBERS

    This 15-minute hybrid non-fiction/experimental documentary essay blends Lida Mkrtchan’s voiceover testimony about her time in bomb shelters in Shushi (Artsakh/Nagorno-Karabakh) with a layered audiovisual landscape. The film moves between tactile close-ups of the narrator’s hands preparing zhengyalov bread and staged studio compositions in which objects, textures and performative gestures metaphorically reimagine the narrated events and inner states through dark video tableaux. The interplay of documentary and poetic imagery illustrates the resilience of the community under siege, the rhythm of daily life and the quiet actions that sustain hope. Moments of beauty, ritual and shared labour coexist alongside stark reflections on…

  • Monument

    Beginning in ghostly abstraction and accumulating texture by texture into a droning meditative trance, Monument deepens to a visual and sonic intensity, mixing Super 8 film with video footage to create a complicated, multilayered encounter with the tension of protest and reclamation. A vivid and energetic durational experience of collective resistance and celebration. Super 8 footage of the decaying monuments of Presidents Park (Croaker, VA) are layered with video footage captured on Monument Avenue (Richmond, VA) during the Covid-19 pandemic and Black Lives Matter protests of 2020. Themes of registration and re- calibration are explored through form and content and…

  • En Memoria

    In a dystopian future, a mother struggles to finish making her daughter’s quinceañera dress.

  • 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.

  • Adieu Ugarit

    In 2012, Mohamad had witnessed his best friend gunned down by an armed militia on the outskirts of Damascus, Syria; the blood spilled into the lake contaminated his memory. Ten years later, the reflections on the Laurentian waters bring back Mohamad’s trauma. I asked him if he’d like to dig out the memories, to repair the pain by retreating for a few days into the most distressing calm possible for him. He tells us about death, immigration and anger. We wonder how and why we should tell this story.

  • Blood Like Water

    Shadi embarks on a secret adventure, and accidentally drags his family into a trap where they only have two choices; either collaborate with the Israeli occupation, or be shamed and humiliated by their own people.

  • Trajectories of Now

    Over an 18-month period, 18 racialized and gender diverse artists took part in creative research to develop artworks and activations responding to the guiding question “What change do you want to make with your art?”. Their work culminated in their group exhibit Trajectories of Now: An Anthology. Through visual, audio, and tactile works, Trajectories of Now documented critical narratives of relationships to identities; both personal and collective. In this short film, eight Trajectories artists discuss their artworks and processes for voicing, surfacing and amplifying creative advocacies and resistances for social change.

  • Incantation

    “Originating in the lens of a discreet hand-crank Bolex camera, ‘Incantation’ is a delirious hand-processed weave of urban protest and contact dance that evokes the powerful spirit of personal and political resistance.” – Images Festival of Independent Film & Video, Toronto, 1997 “‘Incantation’ combines images from last autumn’s anti-Harris protest in Toronto with a dancer, creating a brilliant combination that illuminates the spirit and energy evident in the marches.” – Take One Magazine, Fall 1997