Film Format: 16mm

  • El Nino

    “El Nino” is a poetic experimental film about traveling. On a journey over land and sea, and in a dream on a journey of the soul, a young man suddenly sees the world through the eyes of a child. But as he comes to a crossroads, he sees there are two worlds. One floats in isolation on the sea. The other lies in ruins. And at the end of the day, the ship sails away as the burning suns sets on civilization. The climatic phenomenon, we know as El Nino, was originally named by a Peruvian fisherman in the 1890s…

  • Crashing Skies

    An ordinary rural landscape is transformed into an enigmatic dreamscape. A farmhouse stands in a copper field of scratched emulsion as solarized flares illuminate the sky. Split toned horses amble dreamlike across the frame into inky underexposed blackness. Copper thistles sway in the wind, looming and strangely monumental. The hand-processed 16mm imagery creates an elliptical inner world of memory and dreams. Filmed at the Independent Imaging Retreat in Mount Forest, Ontario. Atmospheric sound design by Edmund Eagan.

  • This Town of Toronto…

    This short film takes a rather unconventional approach to the city symphony genre, which often depicts the rhythms of the city from morning to night and relies on the symphonic composition of shots that, like in musical symphony, build through various movements until their final conclusion. This Town of Toronto… extends its temporal dimension past the span of one day to 108 years, by including some of the earliest motion picture documentations of Toronto: the Great Fire of 1904 and the traffic scene on Bay Street, including horse-drawn fire trucks and firemen rushing to extinguish the fire, all captured by…

  • Happy

    The quest for happiness dictates the shape of many lives in the world. Some find religion, some seek love, but all are searching to be happy. “Happy” moves through hand-processed 16mm film to explore the intersection of happiness, apostasy, and love. “Happy” considers the fiction of happiness and what it truly means, how it is proselytized in the church, media, and each other. Can simply smiling bring about an emotional change? Can being told to be happy make you happy? Has anyone told you that god loves you?

  • Separation

    In Kneller’s film Separation (2008), the tranquil mood captured in a home movie becomes disturbed by its colors separating into rhythms of discontent. The un-synching or dismantling of the film’s colors reveals what the image is made of, namely, densities and layers of colored pigments. Kneller’s action points to a similar layering in the image content: the apparently happy holiday scenes being made up of layers of presumptions of what happiness is.

  • Sources

    Sources originated from Thomas the Gardener’s wish to celebrate the 30th anniversary of his making vegetable pâté. Leaving urban life behind him in order to renew a relationship with the land, Thomas started up an organic garden in the beautiful area of hot and cold springs, lakes and rivers, in the upper Aude Valley. In the middle of making his pâté, the gardener is surrounded, as the water sources of the Aude river rush by, by one of the sources for his recipes, the flowers and spices from his garden. Sound by François Alexis Degrenier

  • Jardins du sel (Salt Garden)

    The production of sea salt flower is a process of concentration-saturation of seawater in order to form crystallization. The agriculture character of the activity is evoked by the term “salt garden.” Six poetic pictures, five based on the sun, the wind and the sea, while the last rests on a small park left fallow. Music by François Alexis Degrenier

  • Solar Sight III

    “In SOLAR SIGHT III I have continued the dream-like form of disparate animated scenes, each with its own ‘romantic-with-an-edge’ slightly surreal flavour. Scenes are sometimes run-on, sometimes separated by brief periods of darkness to relax, as in breathing, the viewing eye. There are no fancy superimpositions now, nor excessive visual trickery. Only comparatively straight forward presentation of the improbable images, which have formed themselves in my improbable mind.” — Lawrence Jordan

  • Hoshi Neko (Little Star)

    This 16mm B&W cut-out animation borrows narrative tropes from early Atari video games, silent films, and anime cartoons, offering a weird story and hybrid aesthetic. The narrative is based on the imagined adventures of the singer’s lost cat, Hoshi. Hoshi eats a koi fish, who emerges angry from his digestive system. The koi enlists the help of a pug to exact revenge, and the three characters embark on an epic chase through the cosmos. Their journey brings them through wormholes and across poisonous planets where their skin is melted off by acid rain.

  • Elegy

    Amidst the ghosts of his cultural roots, Popovich creates a lyrical and loving light monument dealing with separation, change and death. “Part diary, part travelogue, part memorium for a friend’s death, ‘Elegy’ deftly and poetically blends the private concerns of the filmmaker, a discovery of roots in his native Yugoslavia, and the insubstantiality of remembered moments.” – Kass Banning, Now Magazine Screenings: Toronto Festival of Festivals; Krakow Film Festival, Poland; International Documentary Film Festival of Nyon, Switzerland; Ann Arbor Film Festival, Michigan; 5 Jours du Cinéma Indépendent Canadien, Montreal; CBC-TV