Film Format: 16mm

  • Story of the Fish Girl, The

    “The Story of the Fish Girl” is a fantastical tale, told in the style of the silent cinema, about a young woman’s desire to escape her repressive existence, and discover independence and meaning in her life. Her transformation into a fish leads her on a journey of self-realization through the sewers of New York. Passive and naive, the fish girl swims without direction, unable to realize her goal of personal and spiritual fulfillment in the patriachal/animal world of the sewer system. The use of colour through hand-tinting techniques, superimposed over the B&W narrative, creates a visual space full of energy…

  • Sleep Lines

    On a sunny afternoon between dreaming and waking a couple come together and move apart in the interior world of their home. A hand-processed black-and-white queer experimental film exploring the tension between intimacy and separateness.

  • Folk Songs

    “This lyrical and impressionistic rumination on the filmmaker’s Bulgarian heritage explores the impact of family and tradition, the links between the old world and the new, and the simple, lovely gestures that unite generations.” – Hot Docs International Documentary Film Festival, Toronto In 1913, Sophia and Dimitry Makedonsky were teenagers when they left the Ukraine for the United States. Growing up in the Midwest, filmmaker LeAnn Erickson often heard stories of the “old country” her grandparents had left behind. As Erickson travels to Russia, the search for her sense of “place” sparks a re-examination of her family’s immigrant past. Her…

  • Secret Love

    A series of line drawings of a girl are inter-cut with black-and-white Japanese-inspired landscapes and textbook diagrams of electromagnetic waveforms, over which are animated organic materials such as star anise, lavender, poppy seeds, and cranberries. Created for the song by Flotilla.

  • Dante Quartet, The

    This hand-painted work six years in the making (37 in the studying of the “The Divine Comedy”) demonstrates the earthly conditions of “Hell,” “Purgatory” (or Transition) and “Heaven” (or “existence is song,” which is the closest I’d presume upon heaven from my experience) as well as the mainspring of/from “Hell” (Hell Spit Flexion) in four parts which are inspired by the closed-eye or hypnogogic vision created by those emotional states. Original painted on IMAX and Cinemascope 70mm and 35mm, these paint-laden rolls have been carefully rephotographed and translated to 35mm and 16mm compilations by Dan Yankosky of Western Cine. (Stan…

  • Tape Film

    Made as an experiment in hand-processing, the film cycles through five different film stocks and a variety of processing methods. The result created dimensional havoc in the images. The concept of inside and outside is troubled, and the act of enclosure creates a screen on which to project the filmmaker’s own image. Selected screenings: Wavelengths Programme, Toronto International Film Festival, Toronto, ON, 2007

  • acrobat, the

    Inspired in part by a poem by Toronto poet Ryan Kamstra, “the acrobat” is a consideration of the relationship of gravity and politics – the beauty and necessity of rising up, but also, perhaps, the significance of allowing oneself to fall. If the force of gravity is in relation to both mass and proximity, how does the force of politics resonate across space and time?

  • Regard

    This short experimental film mirrors 21st century issues of social deconstruction in everday urban life. Produced in Toronto, during that summer of the London UK transit bombings, it echoes calls for solutions to a threatened, “Homeland” and the notion of security itself. “Regard” plays with impressions of cognizance, consciousness, witnessing, and surveillance in the metroplis, where the passage of human beings through industrialized urban space/time is obversed. Connotations of danger lurk in trains, buses, streetcars, subway/communter trains, and automobile traffic, while bicycles and pedestrains weave sinous paths through the city. A well-intentioned fabric of vulnerability emerges, its irony punctuated by…

  • Pulsions

    “Pulsions” explores the fluidity of space and time through its emphasis on pulsing movement. “Pulsions” is a companion piece to “fugitive l(i)ght” (2005). The two films grew out of one project that aimed to explore the double ellipse/figure “8” that is created through the movements of living bodies, namely humans, birds and insects, underwater and in the air. Music by Colin Clark. Dance (choreography and performance) by Lucie Mongrain. Selected screenings: Alucine Festival, Toronto, ON, 2007; Nuit Blanche, Toronto, ON, 2007; WNDX Festival, Winnipeg Cinematheque, Winnipeg, MB, 2007; Warsaw Media Festival, Poland, 2007

  • Echo

    “Echo” recalls childhood and the native home of the filmmaker through image, song and text. This self-portrait hints at the fragments, the pieces, the painful and repressed shards that the self contains, and through which it strives to piece together and illuminate its mysterious gaps. “‘Echo’ by Izabella Pruska-Oldenhof boldly explores homesickness and cultural yearning through visual imagery, song and text. In this atypical self-portrait, the artist has created a photogram of her body that acts as a travelling matte through the countryside of her native land as she mouths an old Polish immigrant’s song; the original recording pierces like…