Genres: documentary

  • HK Uprising

    A tribute to the ongoing protests in Hong Kong that are taking place three decades after the Tiananmen Square uprising. Note: This film can be displayed as a multi-channel installation with May 35.

  • Sab Shimono: Acting “As If”

    On the eve of his eightieth birthday, acclaimed Japanese American actor Sab Shimono reflects on his lifelong commitment to the craft of acting, his struggles against racism and homophobia, and how his life was transformed by gay bars and marriage equality.

  • Another Europe

    An essay film rooted in experimental cinema and queer storytelling. A female narrator (fellow artist Kathi Hofer) provides the voice over for this film, making it a reflection on my life and my journey through Europe from 2019-2020. Associative spaces unfold. A train of thoughts. The boundaries between factual and memories become a blur. How much of my personal story can be read more globally? Visual portraits of Europe’s faraway places away from typical tourist hot spots provide the mise en scène for this film. Landscapes in transition, pictures of movement, visually resembling the long journeys I have undertaken using…

  • [Être]

    [Être] was a thrift shop and eventually underground screening space in Montreal’s Mile End district. The space featured as its main attraction objects picked-up on garbage nights and accrued over many years by proprietor-curators Alek Gruszczynski et Ewa Zbroch. To be inside [Être] was like being hermetically sealed-off with a proliferation of objects, and objects containing objects, an accumulation of things and surfaces and scents that invariably activate all the senses. Shot in the basement and on the main floor of [Être] just before it closed its doors forever, this film gives a sense of what it was like to…

  • The world is blue at its edges

    “What could I tell you about the world I live in?” Addressing her unborn child, the narrator tries to find answers partly through claustrophobic pictures interwoven with intimate notes on a pregnancy in times of a pandemic. Based on a childhood memory, this experimental short film spans from the Cold War Iron Curtain, to the so-called “refugee crisis,” and the renewed closing of borders during COVID-19. Textures of walls closing in blur with pixelated maps, creating a subjective portrait of a new reality and its digital image-world. // “Iris Blauensteiner’s and Christine Moderbacher’s ‘The world is blue at its edges’…

  • the_other_images

    A hard drive, 2.8 terabyte leftover data from a project that was shot 10 years ago. In 2008, the author and filmmaker Iris Blauensteiner made her first short movie. Now she sifts through this waste material: outtake scenes, photographs, sound files, e-mails, script passages, discarded ideas. This data was archived and well stored, but time has taken its toll. Old data formats cannot be played anymore because they are no longer compatible with current players. The multitude of read errors and image distortions disallow a comfortable recollection of the past, the pictures and sounds are not what they used to…

  • I (heart) Jack Lalanne: A Cartoon Memoir

    This is an animated documentary film structured around the life and legend of Jack LaLanne as it explores my personal experiences growing up female and gay in 1960s-70s America. I was a serious athlete during my early and young adult years, thus the film also delves into issues of self-identity, societal expectations, and the effects of aging on the human body. “I (heart) Jack LaLanne: A Cartoon Memoir” uses classic and computer-based animation techniques that serve as the visuals to voiceover storytelling. Original drawings combine with rotoscoped footage, composited archival video clips float inside retro televisions, while stop-motion vitamins march…

  • The Beautiful Room is Empty

    “Haddad’s The Beautiful Room is Empty explores the loaded memories of space through his aunt, Marie, (re)visiting her childhood home and recalling the abuse she endured there. […] What have the walls been listening to? What have they absorbed, retained, and released upon a return, a farewell?” – Sarah Sarofim, Canadian Art

  • peugeot pulmonaire

    The east of France is dying, we see a half-empty factory and a mass of workers caught between precariousness and impotence. X-rays of their calcified lungs scroll by at the rhythm of a mechanical press under which one suffocates.

  • assia

    A sick child talks about her illness while watching strange images of a life she feels she has never lived.