Genres: documentary

  • Holding Hands with Ilse

    “Holding Hands With Ilse” is a moving documentary about the search for the German teenage girl who took care of the filmmaker between 1948-1950 in Walbrzych, Poland where he was born. Knowing only her first name and circulating a small photograph taken in 1950 of the two, the director explores the urban landscapes of western Poland and the journey involved in their unexpected reunion that recently took place in Ibbenbüren, Germany. Filmed in the USA, Poland and Germany.

  • CARBON SKY

    During the in-between period of the 2017 record breaking forest fires and the 2018 record breaking forest fires, conditions were often ideal in the BC interior for filming at a fixed place with a fixed camera. I would often return to the exact same location time and time again. Sometimes five, ten, or twenty times over a period of days, weeks, and months. The locations that sustained my fascination were more or less located in a geographical triangle from Kamloops to the east, Cache Creek to the west, and Spences Bridge to the south. My main focus was on the…

  • Between Two Cinemas Part 1

    For the past thirty years filmmaker/archivist Ross Lipman has cut a winding path between classic international cinema and the American avant-garde. In this riveting but completely unclassifiable work, he looks back at a life in the cinema and an indescribable divide at the heart of it. Part biography, part clip essay, part abstract painting, “Between Two Cinemas” integrates 4K restorations of his old films inside a new documentary/essay linking them. It uncovers previously unseen archival material on Stan Brakhage and Andrei Tarkovsky, and adds new collaborations with artists including visionary experimentalist Bruce Baillie, Jeanne Dielman cinematographer Babette Mangolte, Bela Tarr…

  • FURNACE

    For three years I researched and filmed various locations in the interior of British Columbia, Canada in more or less a geographical triangle from Kamloops to the east, Ashcroft to the west, and Spences Bridge to the south. My main focus has been the semi-deserts, deep valleys, and plateaus to define how I see the interactions of the natural and manufactured worlds, worlds brought into my perspective by the ever changing presence of shadow and light. Since I began filming this movie in 2016 there has been a yearly increase in the widespread smoke and haze from each new record…

  • The Fenestration of Suburbia

    The Fenestration of Suburbia is a melancholic social documentation of a cold Canadian suburb. Framed behind windows and surveilled from the street, the lives of suburbanites float in the black cinematic frame to form images that are simultaneously sorrowful, mundane, theatrical, and puzzling.

  • The Bed and the Street

    A love story set in the global anti-austerity demonstrations. As citizens take back their streets, two women meet and fall in love. What geometry of desire will help overthrow the state? What micro-politics of sharing and communality will provide fuel for demonstrations that will remove and replace the neo-liberal consensus? Cast in a palimpsest of images and sounds, as if there were no way to separate inside and out, the street and the bedroom.

  • Fotdella

    Fotdella follows Ryan Baer, a Canadian street musician – influenced by San Francisco one-man-band legend Jesse Fuller – as he constructs instruments from salvaged junk and performs in markets, ragtag parades, beach towns and underground spaces. As it drifts from Lake Huron to Berlin, the film captures the solitudes and celebrations of nostalgic touring bands who recycle 20th century blues, jazz and folk cultures. Fotdella tinkers with intimate and surreal performances to present a world of hacksaws, tubas, washboards and song staged between a transnational present and an imagined past. Featuring rare archival footage of Jesse Fuller’s last public concert,…

  • Between Two Cinemas Part 2

    For the past thirty years filmmaker/archivist Ross Lipman has cut a winding path between classic international cinema and the American avant-garde. In this riveting but completely unclassifiable work, he looks back at a life in the cinema and an indescribable divide at the heart of it. Part biography, part clip essay, part abstract painting, “Between Two Cinemas” integrates 4K restorations of his old films inside a new documentary/essay linking them. It uncovers previously unseen archival material on Stan Brakhage and Andrei Tarkovsky, and adds new collaborations with artists including visionary experimentalist Bruce Baillie, Jeanne Dielman cinematographer Babette Mangolte, Bela Tarr…

  • The Day Don Died

    Tucked away in the heart of downtown Vancouver, there’s a condo tower that’s home to long-time members of Canada’s performing arts professions: singers, actors, costume designers, dancers, filmmakers, playwrights, jazz musicians, and more. Now picture this: on Easter Saturday, the residents of Vancouver’s Performing Arts Lodge wake up to discover jazz singer and beloved tenant Don Stewart has unexpectedly died after a Good Friday performance at a neighbourhood bar. But as news travels between his creative and colourful neighbours, the story of Don’s pass takes on a life of its own. Every resident has their own version of what really…

  • CORNUCOPIA

    The interior Plateau of British Columbia is a confluence of volcanism, plate tectonics, and glaciation punctuated by intermittent cycles of fire and droughts. The perennial constant in shaping the plateau is the influence of storms from the Pacific Ocean and the multiple mountain ranges (including the Rockies) that carry glacier silt and other minerals through the myriad of rivers and lakes. For 1000’s of years First Nations Peoples thrived in this region with civilizations and customs that remain a powerful guiding presence today. In 1858 gold rush fever gripped a region in North America that would later become part of…