Film Categories: Society

  • Woman Waiting

    A middle aged woman is faced with poverty. As she struggles to find help within the system, her only option is to wait. Part of “East Hastings Trilogy”.

  • William in White Shirt

    A young man contends with life in the Vancouver Downtown Eastside. As he agrees to visit his young son, the film observes his struggle with this new reality. Part of “East Hastings Trilogy”.

  • 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…

  • Watching the Detectives

    Immediately after the Boston Marathon bombing in April 2013, amateur detectives took to the internet chat rooms to try and find the culprits. Users on reddit, 4chan and other gathering spots poured over photographs uploaded to the sites, looking for any detail that might point to the guilt of potential suspects. Using texts and jpegs culled from these investigations, “Watching the Detectives” narrates the process of crowd-sourcing culpability. “Chris Kennedy’s latest offering is…a half-hour meta-doc about the online sleuthing surrounding the bombing of the Boston Marathon in 2013. Imagine ‘Patriot’s Day’ without Mark Wahlberg leading the charge. Instead, a steadfast…

  • DataMine

    “DataMine” is a stop-motion indictment of surveillance society; laboriously animated by hand with light painting to create surreal imagery without the use of computer generated images. Society embraces an ever-increasing connection to technology, creating digital communities that distract us from our real world existence. As our lives exist more and more in the digital realm, they are catalogued and stored for future mining by corporations and governments. This activity of data mining raises many questions regarding the future of activism and creativity – that which makes us human. In the intricate world of “DataMine,” the oblivious masses are catalogued and…

  • ôtênaw

    “ôtênaw” is a film documenting the oral storytelling of Dwayne Donald, an educator from Treaty 6, Edmonton Canada. Drawing from nêhiyawak philosophies, he speaks about the multilayered histories of Indigenous peoples’ presence both within and around amiskwacîwâskahikan, or what has come to be known as the city of Edmonton.

  • Belen

    BELÉN is a story about the consequences of experiencing a profound inspiration. The inspiration that one woman, a humble cocoa farmer and musician from a small Afro-Venezuelan village, unaware of her powers, generated in her community and in people all over the American continent, during her life, and after her death as a spiritual being. Queen of the Quitipla. Master of bamboo’s sounds and silences. Core and bridge to the African American community, to its connected beats and historical fights. A trip into the puzzled reminiscences of this woman’s life (and death), captured through more than 100 hours of amateur…

  • Mount Misery

    Emotionally drained after learning of the death of her long estranged sister, an elderly woman spends the day lost somewhere between her past and present and her conscious and subconscious mind. In this state, she ponders the inevitabilities of life, death and the hereafter. “Mount Misery” won Best Film prize at the Black International Cinema, Berlin film festival, 2017.

  • 2076 (Elegy)

    In the year 2076, a cyborg finds moving images made by their great-grandmother in the last years of celluloid. Looking at the images, they are struck by the past, causing them to dig into their own memories, history, and identity.  Gleaned from images from the filmmaker’s life, 2076 looks at the ways in which familial history and queer identity are communicated through the archive/photographic image. Topically situated as the analog image is quickly disappearing, this film explores its virtues, illustrating the ways in which the past imbues small moments with power and glimpses of our past can speak and serve…