Film Categories: science/medicine

  • One Hundred Attempts to Make a Film About Depression

    Four years ago I began working on what was supposed to be a documentary about living with depression. In the end, if there is anything harder than having a conversation about depression, it is making a film about it. After numerous shoots, interviews, restarts, and stages of abandonment, I created this piece. The film is an attempt at translating the emotional state of depression, as I experience it. Filmed almost entirely on the Phantom slow motion camera at 1500 frames per second, 100 Attempts To Make a Film About Depression represents an ongoing struggle to be open about coping with…

  • Somnium Lapidum (Dream Stones)

    This stop-motion 16mm film offers an audiovisual meditation on the material animation of stones. The concept is inspired by Camillo Leonardi’s “Speculum Lapidum”, published in 1533, which describes the magical healing virtues of a variety of stones, categorized by colour. The character-based animated vignettes are inspired by the woodcuts in “De Hortus Sanitatis”, a natural history encyclopedia published in 1485, which details various methods of harnessing the power of gems. It was believed at the time that a given gem’s powers could be absorbed through focused viewing. Proposing an analogy between this belief and attraction to cinema, this film offers…

  • Link 8

    Link 8 is an interstitial docufiction that follows a group of individuals participating in a situational wellness center. Through a new type of algorithm users are matched and transform.

  • Four Winds

    Four Winds Wellness Association presents a fictional documentary on Dr. Miles Bennell and Dr. Patricia Lunbed, the founders of Link 8. The video tells the story of how Miles and Patricia meet and form a new technology that influences science and culture called Personality Sharing.

  • The Phoenix

    The Phoenix takes place in the not so distant future. Mankind has developed the ability to transfer the mind and soul of a human being into an android host body. Mars Reveille is a dying man whose life is now moment to moment. He decides to undergo this miraculous procedure for the sake of his grandson Ben. Who without his grandpa would be alone in this world and left to fend for himself. Mars’ transformation is a success but the connection to his grandson is frayed and there are quiet gnawing doubts if Mars is real at all. Mars and…

  • Life and the Art of Lying

    Charlie, a bubbly queer artist, heads into a new year surrounded by her closest friends. But her plans for carefree fun are dashed when she is suddenly confronted with a health crisis. Not wanting to burden those she loves with her news, Charlie lies repeatedly to cover up the severity of her situation. With no easy cures at hand, Charlie turns to her medical doctor, Dr. Simone, and chooses to secretly pursue a renegade solution for her illness. As Charlie’s feelings for her best friend Mara grow stronger, the two women are both forced to confront the painful truths they…

  • HOSER

    This video was constructed in response to my experience of sexual assault and linked to the data collection/research I was doing shortly thereafter in publicly accessible community discourses of sero-conversion (pozzing) fetish, which have since received some scholarly attention in the Academy in the Social Sciences in relation to HIV acquisition/prevention and Queer theory. This tape is a reflection upon ideas of disclosure, self-determination, self-loathing, and informal support networks.

  • On The Department Of Experiential Medicine II

    Initially an anti-gay marriage performance in a veil, speedo and heels reciting the Litanies of Satan, singing a Galasian Amazing Grace and then upending a bottle of champagne into my prelubed anus where the pressure pushed its contents inside. I then evacuate into two glasses and toast with someone from the audience. It then changed into a DIY AIDS-meds Cocktail performance with me dressed as a nurse, juicing beets and pushing vitamin supplements into my anus before taking the champagne. I then evacuate it into glasses with the beet juice and toast the audience with these cocktails.

  • 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.…

  • Doing and undoing: poems from within #1 radiotherapy

    It deals with interventions that I had made with my mother during her cancer treatment. The film is part of large project dealing with my mother’s cancer healing process. Hacer y Deshacer: Poems from Within (2019) is an interactive video installation. Most of the video sequences show Gelis’s mother undressing, one strand of yarn at a time, sometimes in Panama’s Casco Viejo (historic district), sometimes in the turbulent waters of the Pacific. Using her mother’s body, she tells the story of a cancer survivor, the story of countless others. Gelis invites us into the healing process: the viewer can change…