Genres: experimental

  • [T]

    “[T] is a film at the limit of cinema, an experiment in the moving image where stillness and movement converge on each other to produce an experience of time as space. Philippe Leonard shot the footage for this remarkable work at Times Square, in New York City, during the hours of artificial illumination. Partly for this reason, it is an oneiric diary, tempted by myth and, at the same time, suffused by a melancholy sense that myth has lost its magical power. Faces appear and disappear in spasmodic waves of light, which emanate from billboards and mobile telephone screens and…

  • Bunte Kuh

    Through a flood of images and impressions, a narrator attempts to recall a family holiday. Shot in Berlin and Toronto, Bunte Kuh combines a found postcard, a family photo album and original footage to weave together the temporal presence of two separate vacations.

  • Marshlands (Marécage)

    A psychic’s prediction of impending disaster underlies this experimental meditation set on the marshes of Sackville, New Brunswick. Shot on Super 8, 16mm and video, Marshlands moves elliptically from a present steeped in memory to an uncertain future. Un médium prédit un désastre imminent: voilà le point de départ de cette méditation expérimentale se déroulant dans les marais de Sackville, au Nouveau-Brunswick. Tourné en Super 8, en 16mm et en vidéo, Marécage se déplace de façon elliptique, d’un présent enveloppé de souvenir vers un futur incertain.

  • Neither God Nor Santa Maria

    Since airplanes did not exist, people moved around using prayers, they went from one land to another and returned early, before dawn. In old audio recordings, the voices of pastors speak of the mythical existence of witches and their travels. In the daily life of a woman the magic of her tales begin to materialize as night falls. Night is the time when travel is possible.

  • Learning To Milk A Cow

    When the filmmaker’s grandmother was 19, she was taken from Soviet Ukraine to Germany to work on a Bavarian farm under National Socialism. She had the luck and perseverance to survive hardships of the forced famine in her homeland and forced labour in the new one. The stories of her everyday life – learning how to milk a cow, falling in love – are interspersed with three generations of reflections on politics, longing, feelings of displacement and loss. Hand-processed black & white film, colour film, photographs and official documents create a montage of different perspectives. The hand-touch aesthetic combines with…

  • Occidente

    A film-poem of an ecology of sings that speak of a colonial history repeating itself. Subalterns become masters, antiques become reproducible dinner sets, exotic birds become luxury currency, exploration becomes extreme-sport-tourism, monuments become geo-data. A spherical voyage eastwards and westwards marking cycles of expansion in a struggle to find one’s place, one’s sitting around a table. “An ecology of signs lurking amid seductive 16mm travel footage echoes with post-colonial reverberations in Ana Vaz’s deceptively corrosive, award-winning Occidente. – ANDRÉA PICARD (TIFF, Wavelengths)

  • untitled (eleven years)

    A posthumous coming out film diary to my mom. Shot October 11, 1988, Bethel Memorial Park, Detroit.

  • Vertières I, II, III

    The Vertières battle was the last battle before Napoleon’s army withdrew from Haiti, which became the first independent nation in Latin America and the Caribbean. Botkay presents three filmic incursions into the Haitian historical, social and political process. Exploring aspects such as discipline/control, nature/tenderness and the ruin/resistance. this piece investigates the levels of domestication and enslavement resulting from the post-colonial processes that marked the history of the country. This film was selected by Nicole Brenez on the 10 best films 2015 list in Artforum.

  • Imaginary City

    3D animations are typically used by architects to make their designs more vivid. Often a wonderful world is drawn, which seems to be almost perfect. Colossal structures, skyscrapers or apartment buildings,mostly built of ferroconcrete, appearing in the most dazzling colors. The building boom seems to have no limits. But one problem is looming already : The sand needed for the production of concrete runs short. Most natural, easily accessible sand deposits have been exploited, this makes the industry turning to the sand on the sea floor. The results are sinking islands, disappearing beaches and the marine ecosystem is severely damaged.…

  • Forward Motion

    Forward Motion examines commonalities between natural and mechanical movements that serve to propel us through time and space.