Genres: documentary

  • FOREIGN QUARTERS

    My mother’s lost Chinese heritage was a point of departure in this film which investigates the process by which an image is constructed in places foreign from that of my own. The condition of distance genetic to the ethnographic image traces the elusive qualities of her past and persona.

  • Lunch Time

    In this film we drive through downtown Cairo. While exploring the urban life and daily routine of the streets near Tahrir square, we sink into a labyrinth where our path keeps on being cut. During the 2011 revolution it was often said that “the people took back the streets”, but since then the police and military have returned to power and show their supremacy by controlling the public spaces, leaving many to adapt to a system where they have no voice and must work around the obstacles that are left behind.

  • Exilic Trilogy

    “Exilic Trilogy” consists of three arthouse docudrama films from Arsalan Baraheni, the exiled Iranian-Canadian filmmaker based in Toronto. The films present a well known musician, a painter and a poet. The films are biographical, poetic and musical, colliding with social, political and philosophical manifestations. The first film is called “Light and Sound”, starring Soleyman Vaseghi, a well known Iranian musician who was forced to leave Iran after the 1979 revolution when music got banned by the regime. The film is about the light within the mind of the artist and the sound which he produces through his music in exile.…

  • Brunch Queen

    “Brunch Queen” is a hybrid film that follows a hilarious gay couple (who can’t stand each other’s company but are still very much in love) as they prepare for the opening night of a musical based on their infamous insult diner. This 11-min short doc is shot like an episode of a mockumentary television sitcom, like The Office or Modern Family. It’s a humorous and poignant exploration of love and aging in the LGBTQ community.

  • The Williamsburg Houses

    This film gazes into the architecture and lives of the occupants of one of the most ambitious public housing projects ever built in the US. Exploring the remains of a utopian design in contemporary context, we are immersed in the life of a building and a community.

  • Arvind

    After his mentally ill mother is released from prison, Arvind, a 16 year-old biracial queer teenager in Austin, Texas, revisits old family wounds when he writes and produces a play written from his mother’s perspective. When his relationship with the actress who portrays his mother on stage deepens, it sets Arvind on a course that will change his perception of his past.

  • Untitled (Horse)

    A symbiotic collaboration in movie motion. The logic and order intended by Muybridge are destroyed as a means to examine the sublime qualities of the cinema.

  • If I Were Any Further Away I’d Be Closer to Home

    A silent poem reflecting on the place of my mother’s birth and her first traces on earth. A generational portrait of South Asian “makers” becomes a perceptual voyage into memory, experience, and touch.

  • The Spectre Watches Over Her

    A reaction to the seminal text by Swiss anthropologist Paul Wirz entitled Exorcism and the Art of Healing in Ceylon, this high contrast hand processed film considers a history of colonialism and ethnographic practices in South Asia. At my mother’s village, I re-staged an exorcism once performed on her in the early 1960s when she was a little girl. Possessed by the lecherous entity known as the Kalu Kumara, the Sanni Yakuma healing ritual was performed over a 12-hour period.

  • Cruising Elsewhere

    Whatever happened to Wohler Beach? Oral histories and spectral pornography resurrect memories of a once legendary gay beach. “Cruising Elsewhere” won the Jury Award for Best Short Film at the 2017 Tampa Bay International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival. “CRUISING ELSEWHERE is a formally daring – and thoroughly embodied – exploration of gay desire and the utopian possibility of that desire existing unabashedly in public.” – Jules Rosskam