Genres: experimental

  • Livestock

    “Livestock” is a documentary study of one stage in the production of motion picture film. Most of the animals at the Warren Livestock Auction will be sold for industrial meat production. Their bodies will be slaughtered and processed, their bones prepared for rendering into gelatin that might one day suspend silver halide on a strip of acetate.

  • Pariah, my brother, I follow you show me the route to the springs

    The holiday season is fast approaching in Tijuana, Mexico where Saül and his father-in-law, Mathieu are getting ready for a busy day at the street market selling recycled tennis shoes. In the darkness of Dawn, the deserted road to the Market swells up with memories of their migration journey. After a long trek from Haiti, Brazil and nine other South and Central-American countries, they have been here two years, waiting for a chance to claim asylum in the US. We too shall wait for the sunrise, haunted by the words of Davertige, he too, a passer-by on The Route to…

  • wish

    Against the background of the Canadian prairies and the coast of Eastern Canada, wish explores Korean monosyllabic words. While counting to three in Korean, the video explores the multiple meaning of single-syllabic words from one to three that also signify work, labour, profit, etc. Using an observational lens, I documented my retired parents on a trip to the East Coast of Canada. In this video, I explore Canadian landscapes from a diasporic point of view revealing how new narratives emerge when immigrants engage with the Canadian landscape. wish is dedicated to my parents who contributed to the economic fabric of…

  • Officer Tuba Meets Happy Ghost

    soJin Chun combines characters appropriated from two Hong Kong films and digitally rotoscopes them into contemporary Super 8mm film footage shot in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and Toronto, Canada. Pulled from their Hong Kong settings, these characters are recast as Koreans, playing with western perceptions of Asian identity. The ruptures and continuity of culture within diasporic communities frame these figures displaced in time, space, language, and culture. The principal characters in this new film are the titular Officer Tuba (of Where’s Officer Tuba 1986) and an actress taken from the Happy Ghost Franchise (five films 1984-1991). Although they never meet, Chun…

  • Abandoned

    An unfinished housing complex has been abandoned. The imagined future from the past is taken over by foliage and wildlife.

  • Views From Home: Facing North

    Views From Home: Facing North is a short video first shown as part of Edie Steiner’s lens-based exhibition at Gallery 44 Members Space in 2014. The project explores the changing view from her home on the Toronto waterfront from 2004 to late 2019 and is a record of rapid urban development over multiple seasons. The work began as an analogue photographic project on medium format film and later transformed into video recordings, gradually changing from analogue to digital processes over the years of the recordings. Central to the frame is the site of Fort York, which gradually disappears from view…

  • Activate NDN Consciousness

    Activate NDN Consciousness combines found footage of harmful Indigenous portrayals with contemporary NDN protest and revolt.

  • Il Raggio Silenzioso / The Silent Ray

    The man’s presence lingers in the room that for years served as his study. Present and past intertwine as he follows threads of his memory and recalls events from the time of his participation in the colonial war against Ethiopia in 1935-36.

  • What Happens to a Dream Deferred

    It’s New Year’s Eve in Tijuana, Mexico. Wood and Colonel are busy making Soup Joumou to celebrate Haitian Independence Day with their friends at the “Trap House”. As their cooking progresses, memories of the perilous journey that brought them to the US/Mexico border two years ago resurface. From Haiti to Brasil and through nine other South and Central-American countries, here they are, sandwiched between their dream of a musical career in the US and a US president who calls Haiti a shit hole and believes all Haitians have AIDS.

  • Notes from the Anthropocene

    Filmed in vibrant super 16mm color, and black and white film, Notes from the Anthropocene, is a sensory elegy to the dinosaur. The dinosaur icon shifts from narratives of extinction, to human exceptionalism, and power. Its materiality whether fossil or plastic toy has, through popular culture, become entrenched in the imaginary of oil extraction and fossil fuel production. Notes from the Anthropocene is a speculative iconological look at the dinosaur, delivered by an imagined museum guide who ponders our symbolic relationship to an increasing ambivalence towards the natural world. The mythic dinosaurs that emerge resist domestication and seek to transcend…