Genres: experimental

  • Auto Portrait/Self Portrait Post Partum

    SPPP is an autobiographical experimental film exploring the ramifications of the devastating breakup of a romantic relationship. The film examines my own emotional responses in the context of how this experience is culturally represented. Painstakingly handmade, the visual and sound treatments evoke different phases of the relationship (from passionate attachment to escalating conflict to inexplicable breakup) and the various phases of the grieving process – from denial, to yearning, to anger, to final liberation: a healing release effected through the making of this film. A triptych of self-portraits-entire camera rolls, each subjected to different methods of extreme interventions on the…

  • Sous le soleil (Under the Sun)

    In the heat of summer solar panel reflections blend with butterflies on flowers and a little bird eating the mulberries.

  • Dispatches From The Future

    A grieving woman who spends too much time in her car starts to think that it might be haunted.

  • Elephant Dreams

    Five storytellers take off from a physical characteristic of the elephant, much like the fable of the blind men, where each constructs a different whole from a fragment. Elephant-related images are then inserted into their stories, subjectively and associatively. “Elephant Dreams” is essentially about the action of memory and the imagination at work. Everyone makes his or her own story. “Davis plays with the power of suggestion and our knowledge of filmic language to undermine a simple relationship with story and image, and to create a collage of simple pieces that add up to a complex and allusive whole. This…

  • Championship

    At a wrestling tournament, a young competitor faces match upon match. Referees converge on the scene. The crowd’s attention wanes and focuses with the intensity of the bout. Sounds drift in: a psychic piano enters over fast and short breaths. This is a contest of past and future. It will be decided in the ring.

  • Pepper’s Ghost

    How we may see in a Chamber things that are not! Here, mutations of light, through fabric, glass, and colored gel, make bodies and objects transparent. Let there be a chamber wherein no other light comes but by the door or window. Let pictures be set over against this window. For what is without will seem to be within, and what is behind the spectator’s back, he will think to be in the middle of the room, as far from the glass inward as they stand from it outwardly. Clearly and certainly, he will think he sees nothing but truth.

  • Spirits In Season

    Lily Dale is a spiritualist community in Chautauqua County, New York. Pilgrims and tourists swarm the hamlet in summer, but in the fall, Lily Dale becomes a more intimate setting for spectral communions. This film explores the town’s Leolyn Woods, pet cemetery, Inspiration Stump, and Fairy Trail. Music by Nate Wooley.

  • Brébeuf

    A study of St. Ignace, in Huronia, where the ethnographers and Jesuit missionaries, later saints, Jean de Brébeuf and Gabriel Lalemant, were killed in 1649.

  • INTER-MEZZO

    INTER-MEZZO is a documentary of performance as well as a performance of documentary. Through a triptych, which treats the voice as a metaphor for political voice, Stephen Chen traces his journey as a male mezzo, faced with prejudice and marginalization back in Singapore, and later in North America. The schooling and suppression of his voice becomes interwoven with his experiences of colonialism and exile. DOH! OH DEAR, A FEMALE TEAR! plays with the biography documentary form, dealing with issues of voice / gender / representation as Stephen traces his westernization, the discovery and silencing of his voice, and people’s reactions…

  • 11×14

    “One of the most widely praised American avant-garde films in recent years, James Benning’s 1976 feature is a laconic mosaic of single-shot sequences, each offering some sort of image/sound pun or paradox. At once a crypto-narrative with an abstract, peekaboo storyline and a fractured, painterly study of the American midwestern landscape, ‘11×14’ points toward the creation of a new, non-literary but populist cinema.” – J. Hoberman, Village Voice Included in Jonathan Rosenbaum’s “Alternative 100 Top Films,” The Chicago Reader, 1998.