Genres: documentary

  • Schuh Schnell Service

    A simple intersection in Wuppertal, Germany becomes a microcosm of the patterns of everyday life. Cars trace the angles of the streets, pedestrians forge new paths and Wuppertal’s famed Schwebebahn turns our expectations upside-down. Shot on Super 8 in Wuppertal April 28, 2009, while making Phantoms.

  • Elizabeth Smart: On the Side of the Angels

    This compelling film profile of Canadian writer Elizabeth Smart uses archival material, interviews with family and friends, readings and dramatic re-creations to portray a writer who was mythologized in her own lifetime. Elizabeth Smart died in England in 1986, at the age of 72. She is best known for her novel “By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept,” published in 1945, a story of passion and obsession inspired by her love affair with the English poet George Barker. The years subsequent to that dramatic period – the complex relationship she developed with Baker, the period of literary exile…

  • Arrhythmia

    Footage from a cardiac catheterization, intertwined with a recording of a telephone conversation and old 8mm home films, tell the story of a mother’s conflicting desire to escape a poor marriage by returning to her homeland, despite the possibility of being victimized at the hands of the government upon her return due to a past incident. “Arrhythmia” is an intimate piece about family, distance and identity.

  • Dating Sucks: A Genderqueer Misadventure

    An animated documentary web-series about the successes, failures, and incredible confusion trying to date as a genderqueer/trans person.

  • Submerged Queer Spaces

    Submerged Queer Spaces is a documentary feature that examines queer history through an approach of urban archeology. Our cameras look at surviving architectural details of old haunts as if unearthing ancient monuments. As San Francisco grew and gentrified, communities changed, shifted, and were displaced. Bars, restaurants, parks, alleys, bathhouses, and other gathering spots of the queer community were remodeled, repurposed, rebuilt, or destroyed. Submerged Queer Spaces looks at the architectural remains of historic sites and buildings in San Francisco. Eight interview subjects recount firsthand experiences in these lost environs. Gerald Fabien experienced gay San Francisco before WWII, and tells tales…

  • My Father, Francis

    My Father, Francis: a father and daughter collaborate. A comment on kinship, diasporic labour, devotion and the factory as a site of creativity.

  • DOH! OH DEAR, A FEMALE TEAR!

    Using the voice as a metaphor for political voice, Stephen Chen traces his journey as a male mezzo, faced with prejudice and marginalization back in Singapore, and later in North America. The schooling and suppression of his voice becomes interwoven with his experiences of colonialism and exile. Playing with the biography documentary form, DOH! OH DEAR, A FEMALE TEAR! brackets issues of voice / gender / representation as Stephen traces his westernization, the discovery and silencing of his voice, and people’s reactions in Singapore and North America. Reflecting on the “unsettling” quality of his voice, Stephen decided to exploit the…

  • Finding a Place to Sleep

    Based on stories my grandmother told me, I re-imagine while working as a cleaner the experiences of my ancestors during the Holodomor (forced famine) in Ukraine during the Stalinist-Soviet era. The “film” image is re-invented through digital video to enact a sense of ambiguity between authenticity and fiction, as can also be present in the act of oral storytelling. This is one chapter in “Stories for a Future Generation,” a series of shorts which together tell the stories of my family’s and my own migrations, and the inter-generational impacts of those upon our lives and on those of our family’s…

  • The Weight of Snow

    A home movie of a trip to Chernobyl, a dying matriarch and a set of troubling personal circumstances, The Weight of Snow is an essay documenting memory, time and place. A film referencing the tradition of personal travelogue films of The Escarpment School and the essay style of Sans Soleil, The Weight of Snow travels from Canada to Chernobyl from the perspective of a young man exploring radiation in the midst of death, cancer and emotional turmoil. A collection of all techniques used throughout the Lion series, The Weight of Snow is the centerpiece of the work. Echoing the collage…

  • Underground

    Underground presents a performative and re-staged first person documentary portrait of Westminster Station/London Underground, based on footage captured during the time period leading up to and just after the July 7th 2005 transit bombings. Through re-working the original footage, this short piece sets out to explore and present the contradictory moods of the time, from the more official government position of carrying on as usual, to the sense of anxiety felt in the day to day, while highlighting the intangible effects of trauma which shaped the experience of the city and urban space at this time.