Genres: experimental

  • Last Light Breaking

    Words on stone monuments, floating through the frame, suggest that origin always has a powerful, lived base. Deeply charged images seem possessed by the memory of those who have passed through. This experimental film is an examination of the ties that have formed beyond the last light.

  • The Translation is Approximate

    This video focuses a conversation that Naqvi witnessed between her aunt and a domestic worker over financial matters. For many reasons — the ambivalence of the situation, the respective socioeconomic positions of the two women involved in the scene, and the very nature of the recording, which careened between documentary and voyeurism — these images have long haunted Naqvi. In the Translation is Approximate (2021), Naqvi retrieves the original footage that she shot in 2013 and traces back her thoughts about what motivated her to revisit this material. This short video both provides insight into her approach and fundamentally questions…

  • Seaview

    Seaview (2015) is an experimental film which combines home video and captured footage from Karachi, Pakistan. Naqvi travels back to her family’s country of origin to compare childhood memories of this place with lived experience. In the first sequence, she shows video footage of her first trip to Clifton Beach in Karachi. The accompanying text describes her visit to the same beach seventeen years later, and the difficulties in trying to document this place, both as an image maker and as a woman. Naqvi confronts her own personal struggle of being caught between the ideals of Western and Eastern societies.…

  • Sweat

    Sweat presents a lone male figure who enters a sauna and eventually is drowned by his own fear. Is he really under attack by the whispers in the room or are they just voices in his head?

  • i see me watching

    Based on the artist’s personal struggle with gender, i see me watching speculates on the journey to and struggle with finding identity by presenting a first-person depiction of a singular self that has been split into two. The film displays the character’s ever-changing emotions as they follow an anonymous figure through unfamiliar surroundings, and gain awareness of the figure as an integral part of their being.

  • Delight at Robert St

    Buddy, an old stray cat from Toronto, had managed to conquer a small territory of his own in the center of the city. The filmmaker met Buddy’s gaze every time she went out, she befriended her neighbor and captured his last fall with her old 35mm hand cranked movie camera.

  • Modulations

    A short film about memory, dislocation and cultural identity.

  • Orbiter

    A short visit to the surface of a desolate planet, or an inspection of a damaged film print. This film experiment is a continuation of “The Lost World”, examining the physical surface of celluloid film.

  • HERBARIA × PELICULA: Field Portfolio

    This “Field Portfolio” is a single channel version of the multichannel installation “Herbaria × pelicula.” A consideration of collection as both archive and act, “Herbaria × pelicula” examines the work that takes place at the HAM Herbarium of Royal Botanical Gardens (Canada), located in Burlington ON along the edges of Cootes Paradise wetland, traditional territory of the Mississauga and Haudenosaunee peoples. The herbarium collection, which houses over 60,000 holdings, comprises specimens from around the world but is made up primarily of local vascular plant types gathered by the scientific community and educated hobbyists. Combining documentary footage of the herbarium space,…

  • Commerce

    An obsessive review of an obsessive system, Commerce is a diary of the recent spate of tech industry layoffs and the psychic damage left in their wake. Through the use of artificial intelligence with analogue 16mm hand processing, Commerce submits to and explores the minds of leaders that exploit human labour, aroused by the technology poised to replace it. Leveraging generative AI, machine learning, and voice models of presidents and Fox News pundits, the film marries new technology with analogue, challenging the binary we often bring to consuming art. Through this intercourse, Commerce questions the ways we hand authority to…