Film Categories: Urban

  • Private View

    A view out my window and worries in my head. — A PRIVATE VIEW is a site-specific collective screening series curated by John Woods and created as a part of Iris Film Collective’s IN HOUSE series. What is private space and what is public? In the subdivided landscape of Vancouver privacy can be evasive, but each of us views our home as our castle and our homes’ windows give us a unique vantage point that is ours and ours alone. Iris member John Woods gave a roll of expired colour film stock to each of the members of the collective…

  • 581 Bloor Street West

    A chunk of Toronto’s real estate, a historical landmark in fact, as it sits, in a state of sad transition.

  • 86 SE Marine

    A chunk of Vancouver Real Estate as it sits, stuck in the no-zone. —– In 2016, Iris Film Collective presented the first Vancouver Edition of One Take Super 8. 26 artists (IFC members and invited artists) were given one role of either Black and White Kodak Tri-X 200D or Colour Reversal Agfa 200D cartridges. All editing was done “in camera” as it was shot, and the film presented just as it was filmed. No peeking before the night of the screening, it’s straight from the Lab to the Screen. Artists chose to play their film silent or provide sound for…

  • Your Day is My Night

    This provocative hybrid documentary reveals the stories of a Chinatown “shift-bed” apartment through dreams, movement and song. A shift-bed is a domestic space shared by people who are neither in the same family nor in a relationship. Simply put, itʼs an economic necessity brought on by the challenges of urban existence.  In “Your Day is My Night” these beds transform into a stage, illuminating the collective history of Chinese immigration through conversations, autobiographical monologues, and theatrical improvisations.  The film was shot on 16mm, Super 8 and HD video in the kitchens, bedrooms, wedding halls, cafés, and mahjong parlors of New…

  • 1MTH/MIN

    1 MTH/MIN crosses the spring of 2020 from the author’s main view of the outside world during this particular period. Each image represents a 24-hour scan taken every day from March 21 to June 21. Through the frame of a window, the landscape depicts natural phenomena: the flowering of trees, changes in the weather and the extension of daylight until the summer solstice… It is a reflection on space-time in a cinematographic form. From a sedentary point of view, this device explores the film’s ability to play with these dimensions by an effective compression of a really long confinement time.

  • Manifestarsi

    The film investigates within the microscopic dimension the material component of billboards posted in Milan. The author, through a peculiar perspective – achieved with a unique optic – goes beyond the limits of vision, inviting us to fall into the alienating but enveloping physical structure beyond the mythical surface of the images. The cinematic result is an atmosphere that is not abstract but informal. Where the material reflects a visual condition devoid of perspective references on which to base metaphysical foundations: here the process suspends the essence.

  • Heavy Petting

    A lonely young woman scrambling to fill the void left by a missing household pet forges a strange and tenuous bond with an unexpected visitor role-playing in a cat costume. When the animal returns, the visitor is discarded and returns to life of profound solitude and invisibility, which inspires a macabre test of their social obscurity.

  • Freak Folks

    Struggling with anxious thoughts, six individuals wander alone through the city in the late hours of the night. “Freak Folks” is an introspective and therapeutic experience that celebrates the human resilience and emotional connections between apparent strangers.

  • HK Uprising

    A tribute to the ongoing protests in Hong Kong that are taking place three decades after the Tiananmen Square uprising. Note: This film can be displayed as a multi-channel installation with May 35.

  • Sab Shimono: Acting “As If”

    On the eve of his eightieth birthday, acclaimed Japanese American actor Sab Shimono reflects on his lifelong commitment to the craft of acting, his struggles against racism and homophobia, and how his life was transformed by gay bars and marriage equality.