Genres: documentary

  • THINK BEFORE YOU THINK: A PORTRAIT OF RICK RAXLEN

    Think Before You Think is a portrait of film poet, animator and artist Rick Raxlen. Shot on 16mm film and digital video at his Victoria, BC home and studio over the course of a year, the film follows Raxlen’s daily practice, uncovering the rituals and gestures of a creative process. Mining the highly specific and personal nature of this life-sized project, excerpts from Raxlen’s films, drawings, paintings and mark-making from a 50+ year art practice combine with hand-processed and manipulated film materials to play off the rites and relaxed rigour of his unique approach to making a life. “Perfectly captures…

  • Glimmer

    Looking within the forms of my daily life — homeschooling routines, my daughter’s face, shifting refractions of a hanging crystal — I seek to reimagine time not as a flowing river that carries us away, but a quiet lake in which we swim, circling back to moments that reverberate into the infinite. “Heaven would indeed be heaven if lovers were there permitted as much enjoyment as they had experienced on earth.” (Boccaccio) Completed during COVID lockdown for the Greetings From Isolation Project. Music by Colin Fisher.

  • Originate and Recompile

    In 1962 Ernesto De Martino travelled to the South of Italy for his ethnographic research and shot “La Taranta”. A study around women who were poisoned by a Trantula bite while harvesting in the fields. The remedy against the deadly poison was a folk dance called Taranta. The women danced the poison out of their bodies with the help of local musicians and priests. Studies around this phenomenon have highlighted that, in the majority of cases, these women were suffering severe mental illness and hysteria due to sexual abuse and poverty. In present-day Italy a similar dynamic has resurfaced, uncovering…

  • GIRLBAND

    Life on the road. It’s not easy. 50 hours of cub tour footage (1994 & 1996) boiled down to this. Thanks to Canada Council for the Arts, Vtape, Trinity Square Video and FAG for support.

  • 581 Bloor Street West

    A chunk of Toronto’s real estate, a historical landmark in fact, as it sits, in a state of sad transition.

  • 86 SE Marine

    A chunk of Vancouver Real Estate as it sits, stuck in the no-zone. —– In 2016, Iris Film Collective presented the first Vancouver Edition of One Take Super 8. 26 artists (IFC members and invited artists) were given one role of either Black and White Kodak Tri-X 200D or Colour Reversal Agfa 200D cartridges. All editing was done “in camera” as it was shot, and the film presented just as it was filmed. No peeking before the night of the screening, it’s straight from the Lab to the Screen. Artists chose to play their film silent or provide sound for…

  • Gap-Toothed Women

    “Gap-Toothed Women” features Lauren Hutton, Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, Chaucer’s wife of Bath, and many other women who have a space between their two front teeth. The film explores the self-image of women and the pressures they feel to conform to the ideals of mass media. It also reveals many unique and fascinating individuals who happen to be both women and gap-toothed. Film critic Roger Ebert considers this to be one of Les Blank’s best films. “In thirty minutes of interviews, art work, folklore and song, Blank tranforms the issues of gapped teeth into an exploration of how…

  • Queer Coolie-Tudes

    Queer Coolie-tudes is a creative essay documentary and queer ethnography which traces the intergenerational lives, histories, identities, familial relations and sexualities of a diverse range of subjects (academics, artists, and activists) from the Indo-Caribbean diaspora in Canada. Some are mixed race, including: dougla (Indian-African mixture), callaloo (creole mixtures)), genderqueer, disabled, aids activist, and perform drag identity. Image description: A colourful nine-image grid collage of portraits of Queer brown faces. In the centre are two masks, white and turquoise.

  • The Eyes of Summer

    In a small and remote hamlet in Southern Sri Lanka, a little girl develops a curious friendship with a spirit who lives in an abandoned house. This film was shot in my mother’s village in Southern Sri Lanka—shortly after the civil war in 2010. Collaboratively developed with members of my family there, a narrative was improvised around an investigation into my mother’s interactions with spirits in the community during her childhood. Landing somewhere between horror fiction and “spectral” ethnography, the film describes a population reeling from devastations of the past, where distinctions between the living and the dead are thinning.

  • Imitation of Life

    Conceptually informed by Trinh T. Minh-ha’s seminal film “Reassemblage,” this short piece describes an impressionistic encounter with a woman seen from a great distance, who shields her face from a curious telescopic lens whose gaze is confused by an unknown force.