Film Categories: Urban

  • The Island

    A garden between Oakland and Berkley where its inhabitants, marginalized by gentrification, plant fruit trees and flowers to pay homage to their loved ones who died in battles against poverty. This is a space of love and freedom cared by Brian for the last 25 years. The island resists, as a living legacy of the Black Panthers who were the first to organize the neighbourhood.

  • The Ritual of the Sex Magick Warriors

    The Sex Magick Warriors are organizing, they reveal themselves to the city and risk it all to carry out an obscure objective. The colors pink and teal are the embodiment of Magick, Art and Sexuality and their use by the warriors -through empathy, telepathy and tactile care- spills the tea on their means for survival in these harsh urban environments. The ritual exposes the hardships of this army of lovers and reveals their sensual strategy for self preservation.

  • The Shouting Flower

    A work about collaboration and process, “The Shouting Flower” approaches political resistance from multiple subject positions–plant, child, filmmaker–in an attempt to model what Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing calls “work across difference.” Using images processed in plant material that was gathered at key locations throughout the city, as well as direct animation and audio recorded on a child’s toy, the film documents its own creation within a landscape of hostility and neglect. A collaboration against cooperation, it becomes as it refuses. Refusing, dispersing, it shouts, “No!”

  • Officer Tuba Meets Happy Ghost

    soJin Chun combines characters appropriated from two Hong Kong films and digitally rotoscopes them into contemporary Super 8mm film footage shot in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and Toronto, Canada. Pulled from their Hong Kong settings, these characters are recast as Koreans, playing with western perceptions of Asian identity. The ruptures and continuity of culture within diasporic communities frame these figures displaced in time, space, language, and culture. The principal characters in this new film are the titular Officer Tuba (of Where’s Officer Tuba 1986) and an actress taken from the Happy Ghost Franchise (five films 1984-1991). Although they never meet, Chun…

  • Waiting (انتظار)

    A young woman journeys to visit her grandmother. What transpires between the unsaid and silence propels into a prolonged moment of tension and desires of connection. Image description: A young woman and her grandmother sit next to each other on a couch. They both look straight ahead with stony-faced expressions, not talking.

  • Animal Bridge U-3033

    Animal bridge is an experimental nature documentary about a green bridge above motor highway. Animal Bridge U-3033 is about the parallel realities of humans and wild animals. It’s filmed during a year on a bridge above motor highway. These bridges are architecturally engrossing structures, addressed only to the nature, allowing animals to cross the highway. The built environment meets the untouched nature in this narrow strip of urban forest. The 35mm film sequences shot with an old camera create contrast with a mysterious reality captured by trail cameras.

  • My Gentrification

    “A voice tells us: “a friend of mine drew a circle on a map and said, ‘this is where you wanna live’.” The this refers to a subsection of Toronto between Bathurst and Dufferin streets, but it could just as easily refer to the city as a whole, an area bustling with life. Or, at least it did. Marcos Arriaga’s “My Gentrification,” explores the changes in the ever-gentrifying metropolis through the lens of archival footage they procured through decades of documentation. There’s a real Jonas Mekas vibe to Arriaga’s film, which is replete with voiceover narration and grainy celluloid archival…

  • Ruines

    Sur l’autoroute 15, juste à l’extérieur de Montréal, se dresse un monument à la Révolution tranquille : les écrans en décomposition du Ciné Parc Laval, ouvert en 1971, l’année où les ciné-parcs ont marqué l’histoire du Québec. En 1947, sous la pression de l’Église catholique, les ciné-parcs sont interdits au Québec. C’était la tentative de l’Église de réglementer le sexe en dehors de la sphère domestique. À l’origine un drive-in à 2 salles de cinéma, le Ciné Parc Laval est rapidement devenu 4 écrans en raison de sa popularité. Ce film utilise des segments de Frissons (1975) de David Cronenberg…

  • Lines of Force

    The law of general relativity states that all matter is condensed energy. In its purest form, energy is light. Perhaps matter cannot go faster than light because all matter consists of light. (For Paul Clipson.)

  • Vienna

    A meditation on timeless landscapes and the transience of vision.