Genres: documentary

  • The Shouting Flower

    A work about collaboration and process, “The Shouting Flower” approaches political resistance from multiple subject positions–plant, child, filmmaker–in an attempt to model what Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing calls “work across difference.” Using images processed in plant material that was gathered at key locations throughout the city, as well as direct animation and audio recorded on a child’s toy, the film documents its own creation within a landscape of hostility and neglect. A collaboration against cooperation, it becomes as it refuses. Refusing, dispersing, it shouts, “No!”

  • Livestock

    “Livestock” is a documentary study of one stage in the production of motion picture film. Most of the animals at the Warren Livestock Auction will be sold for industrial meat production. Their bodies will be slaughtered and processed, their bones prepared for rendering into gelatin that might one day suspend silver halide on a strip of acetate.

  • Pariah, my brother, I follow you show me the route to the springs

    The holiday season is fast approaching in Tijuana, Mexico where Saül and his father-in-law, Mathieu are getting ready for a busy day at the street market selling recycled tennis shoes. In the darkness of Dawn, the deserted road to the Market swells up with memories of their migration journey. After a long trek from Haiti, Brazil and nine other South and Central-American countries, they have been here two years, waiting for a chance to claim asylum in the US. We too shall wait for the sunrise, haunted by the words of Davertige, he too, a passer-by on The Route to…

  • wish

    Against the background of the Canadian prairies and the coast of Eastern Canada, wish explores Korean monosyllabic words. While counting to three in Korean, the video explores the multiple meaning of single-syllabic words from one to three that also signify work, labour, profit, etc. Using an observational lens, I documented my retired parents on a trip to the East Coast of Canada. In this video, I explore Canadian landscapes from a diasporic point of view revealing how new narratives emerge when immigrants engage with the Canadian landscape. wish is dedicated to my parents who contributed to the economic fabric of…

  • Activate NDN Consciousness

    Activate NDN Consciousness combines found footage of harmful Indigenous portrayals with contemporary NDN protest and revolt.

  • What Happens to a Dream Deferred

    It’s New Year’s Eve in Tijuana, Mexico. Wood and Colonel are busy making Soup Joumou to celebrate Haitian Independence Day with their friends at the “Trap House”. As their cooking progresses, memories of the perilous journey that brought them to the US/Mexico border two years ago resurface. From Haiti to Brasil and through nine other South and Central-American countries, here they are, sandwiched between their dream of a musical career in the US and a US president who calls Haiti a shit hole and believes all Haitians have AIDS.

  • Notes from the Anthropocene

    Filmed in vibrant super 16mm color, and black and white film, Notes from the Anthropocene, is a sensory elegy to the dinosaur. The dinosaur icon shifts from narratives of extinction, to human exceptionalism, and power. Its materiality whether fossil or plastic toy has, through popular culture, become entrenched in the imaginary of oil extraction and fossil fuel production. Notes from the Anthropocene is a speculative iconological look at the dinosaur, delivered by an imagined museum guide who ponders our symbolic relationship to an increasing ambivalence towards the natural world. The mythic dinosaurs that emerge resist domestication and seek to transcend…

  • Una Sola Sangre

    “I have two homelands, but one blood,” says Silvia Galdes in Una Sola Sangre, the latest film by the Haitian-born, Toronto-based filmmaker Esery Mondesir. Silvia, along with her siblings Silverio and Estella, is a first-generation Haitian-Cuban, the daughter of Sylvain Galdes, one of an estimated 500.000 Haitians who migrated to Cuba for work in the early 20th century. Despite not seeing their father’s homeland until their sixth decades (and after the shooting of the film), the Galdes family and their social position in Cuba has long been marked by their Haitianness – an identity they and their children negotiate in…

  • Sammy

    Toronto, July 27, 2013, shortly after midnight. Sammy Yatim is standing inside an empty streetcar, a small knife in his right hand. A Toronto Police officer will shoot him dead. From a mixture of gunpowder, blood and acrimony: the portrait of a boy who didn’t have to die.

  • On A Clear Day You Can See The Revolution From Here

    An expansive journey through the Kazakh steppe, On A Clear Day You Can See the Revolution From Here excavates layers of myth, history and geology to reveal the shifting fault lines between a government, its people and their land. The film brings into focus Kazakhstan’s search for a post-Soviet identity and a state-sponsored programme of cultural production that on the one hand connects back to the ancient folklore and belief systems of the Silk Road, while on the other, seeks to embrace the values of Western capitalism. Taking an experimental documentary form, On A Clear Day provides a meditative faux…