Genres: short

  • ATALAYA

    “Atalaya” means watchtower in Spanish. It’s also the name of the Chilean islands where, in 1998, debris was found from the boat belonging to the filmmaker’s seafaring father, Gerry Roufs, lost at sea. It’s also a key word of the book written by her mother, Michèle Cartier, which recounts the search she undertook to find him. ATALAYA is the filmmaker’s pilgrimage to Cape Horn, camera in hand, memories flowing through her mind; an essay on her reflections on that inescapable grief, on how memory is affected by the presence of absence, and on how life naturally follows its course. Short…

  • Wavewidth

    Wavewidth captures the sense of calm that a seaside landscape can provide. Lifted by waves of time, the spatio-temporal markers are disturbed by the sound. The marine and sound waves resonate in a contemplative cinematographic experience.

  • Homunculi

    Filmed sporadically and intuitively during the summer months of 2020 and 2021, Homunculi is a recontextualization of a personal archive of hand processed 16mm “home movies” and various cinematographic experiments. Reassembled, these once disparate images form a cinematic prism in which to view and confront the prevalent anxieties of an increasing uncertain future. Homunculi is a visual and sonic daydream, reaching beneath the facade of domestic and pastoral tranquility to reveal a lurking, inevitable force that promises to tear the world asunder.

  • Pressure & Release

    Pressure & Release is a multi-layered story drawn from memories of my paradoxical sleep, a sub-conscious response to the recognition that we are amid the “Anthropocene period” and the “Holocene extinction.” Certain ideologies combined with well ingrained cultural practices are driving this rapid transformation into something we may or may not yet imagine as this era’s lasting presence unfolds.

  • Turbulence

    Turbulence is a meditation on various places in the Canadian Prairies, places that are part of an ancient Precambrian seabed rebounding from the last ice age. This is a region that once had a dynamic range of plants and wildlife supporting ancient cultures that flourished here for millennia.

  • No Rest for the Restless

    Some stories appear complete, while others do not. Some stories are remembered, while others are forgotten. Some stories obscure, while others reveal. Even though somewhat different in shape and form “No Rest for the Restless” is in some ways a subconscious re-imagining of an exhibition I had many years ago of the same name. At that time, I found the human project to be astounding and baffling. I continue to be astounded and baffled today.

  • Nautilus

    Unlike its close relative the octopus, the Nautilus has a poor memory and yet it has managed to exist for half a billion years. Our ancestors have been on Earth for about six million years, while modern humans evolved in the last 200,000. Civilization as it is generally understood today began approximately 6,000 years ago, and the industrialization of the natural world began its accelerating trajectory in the past two centuries. According to fossil records the chambered Nautilus has remained fundamental unchanged for about five hundred million years. What I wonder will the records show of our presence on planet…

  • Isolated Gestures

    With Isolated Gestures I am primarily concerned with exploring the interplay of sunlight and shadows with weather as the narrative. The story for me is in how light contrasts the absence of light in shaping forms within a given frame of time and space. I generally gravitate towards places that reveal the many layers of time, stimulating reflections on all the different life forms that may have existed in a particular location where I have set up my camera and tripod. This is when I imagine worlds that have passed, worlds that are present, and worlds that are yet to…

  • The Sun comes out at Night

    During a severe thunderstorm in Saskatchewan, Canada Buckminster Fuller* appears, disappears, then re-appears in a gas station parking lot discussing World War I, the shift from animal/human power to the machine, as well as the law of thermodynamics and evolution. If I were a futurist, I would predict that the world Buckminster Fuller describes in the 20th Century, or the world we are familiar with today in the early 21st Century will be a very different world in the 22nd Century. Acquiring energy is the core concern of all living entities such as photosynthesis, or vegetable/animal matter. Along with water…

  • A Tree Gets in the Way

    We are a determined species. We make plans and calculate in advance how to accomplish a goal. These calculations are not always completely accurate wherein something unanticipated can occur. On a warm spring day, I saw this house on a truck being moved to an empty lot. It looked like it would take maybe a half hour to position the house. That was until its progress was prevented by a tree in the corner of the lot. This delayed the operation until the tree could be removed.