Film Categories: Society

  • The Propagation of Uncertainty

    Emily DiCarlo’s three-channel video installation The Propagation of Uncertainty (2020) explores the friction that occurs between, what she termed, “the infrastructure of time with the intimacy of duration.” The work focuses on time frequency standards and how our accelerated, networked world relies on the foundation of Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). With airports, stock markets and telecommunications operating through precise temporal orchestration, UTC reigns authoritatively omnipresent, but in actuality, is anything but absolute. Through a month-long “post-real time” process, collected asynchronous data from 82 master atomic clocks around the world is reckoned at the International Bureau for Weights and Measures (BIPM)…

  • 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.

  • Peace

    Peace, takes its starting point from a super 8 found footage film material, and is a collaboration between me and Lisa Marr. I asked Lisa to read the word peace in 18 different languages; English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Dutch, Swedish, Russian, Polish, Hungarian, Greek, Turkish, Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, Hindi, Urdu. Sound/Voice: Lisa Marr

  • One Thing I Can Afford

    Louie Sanchez is the performance moniker of Filipinx artist Eirene Cloma. Cloma has recently completed a small collection of songs that broadly reflects on their working-class Filipinx upbringing in North Vancouver and the entanglements of diaspora, interracial relations, and queer desire that texture their everyday experiences. The video for their song One Thing I Can Afford broadly addresses queer and trans friendship in the diaspora, Filipinx masculinities, and everyday enactments of transgenerational care.

  • Cha ni chinu chi’in ñu’un / Construida de tierra / Built of Earth

    Cha ni chinu chi’in ñu’un / Construida de tierra / Built of Earth is an experimental documentary project consisting of a short film, a publication, and a collaborative installation that explores the immense and ancient family home at the centre of Jamiltepec, Oaxaca, Mexico. The cavernous adobe house is in the process of being restored after a devastating earthquake that saw a portion of its roof collapse in February 2018. The short film follows the restoration process, with its focus on traditional building materials and techniques, creative reuse, and local artisanal production. In doing so, it explores the origins of…

  • Facing the Music

    FACING THE MUSIC:ABOUT A MAN WHO ESCAPED STALIN AND HITLER—AND PUTIN’S RESURRECTION OF BOTH STALIN AND HITLER IN UKRAINE. Wolodymyr joined the Ukrainian partisans in 1939. They were hiding cultural lead- ers who would otherwise be persecuted or murdered by Stalin. After Hitler invaded in 1941, Wolodymyr was abducted to Germany, surviving forced labour and incar- ceration in a concentration camp. Extrapolating from Wolodymyr’s story, the film shows how the atrocities he experi- enced via Stalin and Hitler have been the ‘blueprint’ for Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Putin’s Wagner Group mercenaries were named after Hitler’s favourite composer: Richard Wagner. The…

  • Der Untermensch

    Dedicated to the memory of the Second World War’s homosexual victims. This short contemporary dance film abstractly depicts the persecution of homosexuals at the hands of the Third Reich by establishing a parallel between incarceration in the camps and the physical confinement felt when freedom is suppressed.

  • Karaoke

    The home has changed. The palm oil trees have grown in endless symmetry. The landscape rusts and the nostalgia turns. KARAOKE is a homecoming story. BETIK returns to his village to help his mother with the karaoke a few years after the death of his father. During the day, he has also taken a job with his uncle making karaoke videos. KARAOKE is a story that takes you back home yet reminds you to go back where you came from. KARAOKE is a debut feature film about home and deception in a karaoke club within a palm oil plantation in…

  • back home

    back home follows filmmaker, Nisha Platzer’s pursuit to get to know her older brother, Josh, twenty years after he took his own life. As she connects with the friends who knew him best as a teen, a complex portrait emerges. Through intimate recollections re-imagined on Super8 and 16mm film, and lyrical images hand-processed with plants, seaweed, soil and ashes, ‘back home’ floats between memory and present time in a fragmented meditation on identity, grief and loss: illuminating the transformative power of healing in community.

  • Dear Friend, Where Have You Gone?

    For Jayden Martin, art is more than just a hobby. It’s his escape, his passion, and his lifeline. But as an artist in the small, rural community of Englehart, Ontario, Jayden’s dreams of making it big seem almost impossible. Despite growing up with divorced parents and struggling with addiction, mental health, and suicide, he remains determined to succeed. “Dear Friend, Where Have You Gone?” offers a rare glimpse into Jayden’s world as he navigates the challenges of small-town life and grapples with his own inner demons. This powerful documentary is an inspiring reminder of human resilience and the transformative power…