Film Categories: War + Conflict

  • Blood on The Square: Surviving Rabaa

    Blood on The Square: Surviving Rabaa is a documentary about the Rabaa massacre in Egypt, described by Human Rights Watch as “one of the world’s largest killings of demonstrators in a single day in recent history.” Canadian-Egyptian filmmaker, Mohamed Dawood, who witnessed and survived the military-led massacre embarks on a journey of healing by seeking out other survivors who were present in Rabaa on that fateful day.

  • Hoa

    Before developing her memory disorders, my grandmother Trần Thị Tuyết Hoa wrote an autobiographical book about her life and its events. The book is titled “Hồi Ức Tuyết Hoa” (Memories of Tuyết Hoa), and subtitled “Khi Đất Nước Tôi Thanh Bình: Hồi ức của một nữ sinh viên Sài Gòn” (When My Country is Peaceful: Memoirs of a Saigon Female Student). She now reads this book everyday in her Hanoi home. In the form of a poetic letter, this short film is dedicated to her, from me, a grandchild.

  • I Want To Kill Myself

    Contemplating suicide: a biography.

  • Traje de Luces | Suit of Lights

    Traje de Luces | Suit of Lights is an expressive documentary composed with footage of a Spanish bullfight, that iconic imagery of highly decorated masculinity and violence masked as nationalism. The footage was drawn from Jacques Madvo Collection material filmed in Spain between 1976-1978. Madvo shot this footage at a time when Spain began its difficult and flawed transition to democracy in the years following dictator Francisco Franco’s death in 1975. The film consists of 16mm footage that has been decayed in soil, contact-printed and laboriously re-photographed and these abstractions of light and darkness ground the inquiry surrounding why citizens…

  • Semiotics of Sab

    This experimental film essay explores the poetics of identity through an oblique portrait of gay Japanese American actor Sab Shimono. For more than five decades, Shimono has performed on stage and screen in over 150 roles as warlords, bus boys, and businessmen. Shimono asks, “How is it that we know who we are?” Recalling early structuralist works by Hollis Frampton and Martha Rosler, Semiotics of Sab displays the grammatology of queer Asian American masculinity through conflicting lexicons of race, representation, and selfhood.

  • Looking for Jiro

    “Looking for Jiro” explores the hidden dimensions of same sex intimacy for Japanese Americans incarcerated by the US government during World War II. This experimental performance video is inspired by Jiro Onuma, a gay Issei (immigrant) who was imprisoned at Topaz concentration camp in central Utah. He worked in the prison mess hall and was also an avid fan of homoerotic male physique magazines. How did this dandy gay bachelor from San Francisco survive the isolation, humiliation, and homophobia of imprisonment? This queer musical mash-up video features drag king performance, US propaganda footage, muscle building, and homoerotic bread making. This…

  • Loathing

    The film depicts a society controlled by an autonomous system. While plebs are unhappy with their Designer overlords, a smart assistant takes part in a Luddite conspiracy against them. The conspiracy fails. The assistant recounts the events of the revolution in a court of law

  • aw • rah • nyoosh

    A documentary filmmaker attempts to imagine, along with his father, his grandmother’s experience at a labor camp during the holocaust. As they get drawn into a world of the grandmother’s romance, they begin to lose control of their imaginations. “The son installs the camera, the father stands on the sofa. They are preparing to begin an intergenerational dialogue based on the newspaper that their mother and grandmother, Sari, held in the 40s, during his deportation. aw • rah • nyoosh [aranyos] , from Ben Neufeld, takes time to set up; the viewer takes time to understand the contract that the…

  • Empire State

    As an Elder goes about preparing wild onions and corn, the outside world infiltrates through the TV: the fall of the Twin Towers, the hit on Baghdad, and the first death of a Native American soldier overseas. A subtly poignant film that simply told gives strength to the old man and to those who bear witness. Image description: An Indigenous Elder’s hands hold a paring knife, cutting the roots off a wild green onion stalk. More green onions lie on a cloth below.

  • Potamkin

    In 1933, at age 33, Harry Alan Potamkin died of complications related to starvation, at a time when he was one of the world’s most respected film critics. In his writings, he advocated for a cinema that would simultaneously embrace the fractures and polyphony of modern life and the equitable social vision of left radical politics. This film-biography is assembled out of distorted fragments of films on which he had written, an impression of erupting consciousness. At the Odessa steps, trampling gives breath to the child. The bullet miraculously reforms the face. The Cossacks march backwards, retreating unseen into their…