Genres: experimental

  • Brown Christmas with Colour

    Without Snow, we lit up the season like never before. Part of “Twenty Five Short Films in and about Saskatchewan.”

  • toybox

    “Like many of Wrik Mead’s previous films, ‘toybox’ combines creepiness and playfulness in a series of animations that manipulate the most misused toy of all – the penis. Stripped of eros and emotion, Mead’s scenarios of sex-gone-mad play with the absurd qualities of an appendage and a desire that has a mind of its own, and a drive so strong that it leads to self-destruction. Wrik Mead’s animated film plays with his own box of experimental toys, combining all of this talented filmmaker’s previous techniques – pixilation, claymation, stop-motion and cut-outs – in a series of video shorts tied together…

  • NYC Dilemma

    In 2002-2003, San Francisco composer Jack Curtis Dubowsky moved to a fifth-floor walk-up in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. This semi-verité musical video by Todd Wilson (Under One Roof), shot entirely in one day, documents the great dilemmas of NYC life. Go to the survival job, or attend a business meeting with a potential client (portrayed by real-life client and director Elizabeth Elson [Born in a Barn])? Eat lunch or scavange? How hot is it outside? How to afford a gym? And, the greatest mystery of all, if this is an “E train running on the F line,” is it an…

  • Dante Quartet, The

    This hand-painted work six years in the making (37 in the studying of the “The Divine Comedy”) demonstrates the earthly conditions of “Hell,” “Purgatory” (or Transition) and “Heaven” (or “existence is song,” which is the closest I’d presume upon heaven from my experience) as well as the mainspring of/from “Hell” (Hell Spit Flexion) in four parts which are inspired by the closed-eye or hypnogogic vision created by those emotional states. Original painted on IMAX and Cinemascope 70mm and 35mm, these paint-laden rolls have been carefully rephotographed and translated to 35mm and 16mm compilations by Dan Yankosky of Western Cine. (Stan…

  • Kolam (Pool)

    “‘Pool’ is a touching portrait of a community attempting to rebuild and heal itself following the devastating 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami that shocked the world. The titular swimming pool is a temporary makeshift basin created to help the children of Aceh, Indonesia, face their fear of water and learn to swim again, despite the losses their community suffered when the sea came crashing in. Chong Chan Fui observes their progress with affection and a poet’s eye.” – Andrea Picard, Toronto International Film Festival In Indonesian, Acehnese and English with English subtitles. Awards: Winner of the Award for Best Canadian Short,…

  • Tape Film

    Made as an experiment in hand-processing, the film cycles through five different film stocks and a variety of processing methods. The result created dimensional havoc in the images. The concept of inside and outside is troubled, and the act of enclosure creates a screen on which to project the filmmaker’s own image. Selected screenings: Wavelengths Programme, Toronto International Film Festival, Toronto, ON, 2007

  • acrobat, the

    Inspired in part by a poem by Toronto poet Ryan Kamstra, “the acrobat” is a consideration of the relationship of gravity and politics – the beauty and necessity of rising up, but also, perhaps, the significance of allowing oneself to fall. If the force of gravity is in relation to both mass and proximity, how does the force of politics resonate across space and time?

  • Regard

    This short experimental film mirrors 21st century issues of social deconstruction in everday urban life. Produced in Toronto, during that summer of the London UK transit bombings, it echoes calls for solutions to a threatened, “Homeland” and the notion of security itself. “Regard” plays with impressions of cognizance, consciousness, witnessing, and surveillance in the metroplis, where the passage of human beings through industrialized urban space/time is obversed. Connotations of danger lurk in trains, buses, streetcars, subway/communter trains, and automobile traffic, while bicycles and pedestrains weave sinous paths through the city. A well-intentioned fabric of vulnerability emerges, its irony punctuated by…

  • Shadow Tracing

    A young Chinese woman challenged by identity and history, but enchanted with retro filmmaking in a digital world, makes a life decision – to purchase a vintage, hand-crank movie camera. The camera recalls images of wacky “Hollywood Chinatowns” from Hollywood films made in Colonialist times. While examining it, and dreaming of becoming a cameraman herself, she discovers the marks of former Chinese owners, and she envisions historical scenes that the camera may have seen in China. Her wishes are fulfilled as she films the streets of her own hood, in Toronto’s Asian community.

  • Pulsions

    “Pulsions” explores the fluidity of space and time through its emphasis on pulsing movement. “Pulsions” is a companion piece to “fugitive l(i)ght” (2005). The two films grew out of one project that aimed to explore the double ellipse/figure “8” that is created through the movements of living bodies, namely humans, birds and insects, underwater and in the air. Music by Colin Clark. Dance (choreography and performance) by Lucie Mongrain. Selected screenings: Alucine Festival, Toronto, ON, 2007; Nuit Blanche, Toronto, ON, 2007; WNDX Festival, Winnipeg Cinematheque, Winnipeg, MB, 2007; Warsaw Media Festival, Poland, 2007