Genres: experimental

  • Fevered

    ‘Fevered’ is a meditation on the heated drama enacted by lakes and rivers as winter unravels. Piecing together 16mm footage and sound recordings, Peters re-imagines the pulsing of waterways as a metaphorical rhizome swelling outward in a feverish response to global warming.

  • Dam’d

    Using 16mm film altered in part by algae and zebra mussels, ‘Dam’d’ illuminates parallel behaviours between human and invasive species and their impact on waterways. The mutation of film footage acts as a metaphor for the erosion and evolution of the aquatic ecosystems it records.

  • Shifting Baseline

    Motion picture film decomposes in a bath of toxic cyanobacteria collected from a shore where children are playing. A child’s piano improvisation plays over the bacterial impressions in memory of a fleeting moment. ‘Shifting Baseline’ combines ecological and filmic processes to capture and animate an environment that is rapidly slipping away.

  • Antigone

    In “Antigone” we re-visit the twisted shapes of the Master in his various get-ups: father, king, detective, god, stats, text, son…film director. Also featuring a familiar mother-lover combo. “…A blast of fresh air on the experimental scene, this cheeky, post-modern story about the story rips apart any pretensions we may hold about the avant-garde, the Canadian film industry, or narrative itself.” – Festival of Festivals “Antigone” rolls out black and white, silent-movie style, with a blast of horns and the mock-mournful strains of the violin. Slapstick sounds and Popovich’s narration prick the pretensions of those involved in retelling the [Oedipus…

  • Gently Down the Stream

    The text of “Gently Down the Stream” is a succession of fourteen dreams taken from eight years of my journals. The text is scratched onto the film so that you don’t hear any voice but that of a recorded narrator. The images of women, water, animals, and saints were chosen for their indirect but potent correspondence to the text. I chose to work with dre ams that express my deepest anxieties and longings, or that have forced a sudden awareness about a nagging problem. “I go to the circus to see women fly through the air with the greatest of…

  • Meltwater

    Meltwater is an icy terrain that dissolves into sweeping waves of shadows. Blurring the horizon between the real and the imagined, the possible and the unthinkable, this vision is a meditation on global warming and its havoc on the rhythms of the natural world. In addition to festival presentation, Meltwater can be played as a seamless, infinite loop in a single or multi-channel installation.

  • Into the Wild

    A glimpse through the cracks, somebody is walking in the meadow, trees and flowers trembling in the wind. A world that only film can see, a material flow emerging from the coupling of camera, celluloid, silver salts, chemicals, light particles and the hand of the filmmaker. The film was entirely processed by hand and chemically treated: overexposed images were brought back to life with bleach, other images were solarized and reversed.

  • The Sweater

    Historian Carolyn Steedman, in writing about her own working-class childhood, describes how, for children of working-class families, it is often the mother and not the father who embodies power. The child experiences a father who is relatively powerless in the larger social world outside the home, so that even if he is physically powerful, as my father was, he can simultaneously be perceived as a weak man. “The Sweater” blends 16mm hand processed film with found footage and video to explore childhood memories triggered by finding the last thing my deceased father gave me. Using short vignettes, I tell several…

  • A Life on the Borderlands

    This is a film about my father, who immigrated to Montreal from Chile in the early 1970s after a hard-scrabble life on the streets of Santiago as a youth. Like my mother, who immigrated from Argentina around that time, his mobile life was characterised by neither chain migration nor lasting social ties with members of his ethnic group. His story is also a story about class, politics, and complicated histories of migration and exile.

  • A Parent’s Wishlist

    A short film about upward mobility and working class aspirations, A Parent’s Wishlist focuses on something that could be found in many North American homes between the mid-twentieth and early twenty-first centuries – a set of encyclopedias. Dragged from one city to another and across the country by my Chilean father, his Encyclopedia Britannica set came to symbolise his hope for a better life for both himself, and for me.