Film Categories: Sustainability

  • Salvage Archives

    Salvage Archives continues Rufelds’ research into cultural and subcultural expressions of late capitalist alienation, and the forms of collective storytelling that take shape under the shadows of unjust material systems. Told in a hybrid narrative style, mixing elements of essay film, social realism, and neo-noir, Salvage Archives oscillates between two narrative threads, counterposing a lonely online conspiracy theorist and a disembodied historian of agriculture. The two figures recount their stories in alternating chapters, perversely mirroring each other as they wade into the knotted abstractions of capitalist productive systems, logistics networks, patterns of accumulation, and systemic waste. As both narrators’ grandiose…

  • Linea ver

    Spring sculpts their fierce emergence. Aspen, cedar, red oak, lichen (and others) phytograms on super-8mm tri-x film. Language: plants

  • diario de verano

    diario de verano is an exploration of neighborhood flora in Tkaronto, focusing on Kensington Market, Parkdale and Wallace – Emmerson, areas we live and move through. Experimentation with abstract movement and the physical, compositional properties of foraged materials, strengthened our community/kinship to the land and each other. Artistic practices were explored and shared through gathering rituals, stop motion animation and phytograms, creating complex layers of ourselves intertwined through our latinx identities in this short film. Language: plants

  • Two or Three Saprophytes

    Two or Three Saprophytes is a video essay that traces a speculative history of the industrial revolution, its ecological backdrop, and its intellectual legacy of growth-based thinking. Breaking from strictly didactic or documentary forms, the film defracts its historical research through a hallucinatory poetic lens, mixing critique and fantasy to frame the interconnected histories of mushrooms, trees, coal, chemicals, machines, and capitalists as a kind of ecological ghost story. Visual and textual motifs of circles, spirals, hexagons, and “revolutions” punctuate the film, sketching associations and contrasts between historical movements, economic patterns, rotational pistons, chemical diagrams, and ecological balance. Posing a…

  • Maybe…EARTH

    It is very easy to die on Mars. Yet the race to the cold, dark and oxygen-deprived planet has never been stronger. Maybe it’s some kind of self-fulfilling prophecy driven by billionaires. Maybe plants can help break the spell. Maybe…EARTH.

  • Cam Boy

    A student takes up sex camming as a means to pay his rent; he becomes good at it until one of his sex toys, whom he is friends with, wants to go to the next level.

  • Solomon’s Seal (Part 05 of Augury)

    Immanuel Kant’s wager: the moral law within and the heavens above. Fear, flight and infinity, post 9/11. Guided by an original soundtrack of Appalachian dirges and drones, this is the fourth of eight connected works which contemplate the history of, and possible responses to, technophilia. Through augury a city is founded: the bridge, the temple, the tower, the burial ground. Using handheld and macro video, family super 8 and archival footage, Augury explores the fissures in constructed space for signs of personhood, care, and the possibility of a shared pre-linguistic ground. At each site, various strategies of ethical engagement are…

  • Ol’ Icarus (Part 06 of Augury)

    All that is solid melts into air. A requiem for Thomas Kuhn. Guided by an original soundtrack of Appalachian dirges and drones, this is the sixth of eight connected works which contemplate the history of, and possible responses to, technophilia. Through augury a city is founded: the bridge, the temple, the tower, the burial ground. Using handheld and macro video, family super 8 and archival footage, Augury explores the fissures in constructed space for signs of personhood, care, and the possibility of a shared pre-linguistic ground. At each site, various strategies of ethical engagement are suggested: wait out the techno-enthrallment,…

  • Hollow Casket (Part 07 of Augury)

    The gravity of thought. The inner teachings of fire. Guided by an original soundtrack of Appalachian dirges and drones, this is the seventh of eight connected works which contemplate the history of, and possible responses to, technophilia. Through augury a city is founded: the bridge, the temple, the tower, the burial ground. Using handheld and macro video, family super 8 and archival footage, Augury explores the fissures in constructed space for signs of personhood, care, and the possibility of a shared pre-linguistic ground. At each site, various strategies of ethical engagement are suggested: wait out the techno-enthrallment, unconceal the ancient…

  • Soy un ser cuyas raíces // I am a being whose roots

    Soy un ser cuyas raíces // I am a being whose roots reworks Jacques Madvo’s Countries & People: Venezuela to explore labour and migration. Taking the final words of the film’s voice-over as a starting point, Soy un ser cuyas raíces // I am a being whose roots pairs Madvo’s film footage with a text-based conversation with young Venezuelan literature scholar and language teacher Angel Said Dominguez Pinto. Dominguez Pinto relocated to Panama in 2014 to make a living teaching English, Spanish & German in Panama City after Venezuela’s economic collapse. Over e-mail, we co-authored a conversational text, exploring migration,…