Language: English

  • Kissing Drew

    Inside a drab middle school in 1992, a sexually-confused eighth-grader attempts to regain his dignity after being bullied by a sex-obsessed ‘cool kid’ whom he privately fantasizes about.

  • My Father, Francis

    My Father, Francis: a father and daughter collaborate. A comment on kinship, diasporic labour, devotion and the factory as a site of creativity.

  • Little Devil

    A troublesome, disabled fag hag absconds to London to find love and opportunity. But life deals her some unexpected twists when she winds up peddling drugs to the queer community and forms an unorthodox relationship with a washed-up gay male escort. On its surface, Little Devil is designed to be an entertaining, but controversial comedy-drama with some crazy and off-the-wall characters trying to get by, and ultimately find happiness, in a troubled and often unfair world. But scratch beneath the surface and it is a film that has a lot to say about perceptions of sex and disability while opening…

  • DOH! OH DEAR, A FEMALE TEAR!

    Using the voice as a metaphor for political voice, Stephen Chen traces his journey as a male mezzo, faced with prejudice and marginalization back in Singapore, and later in North America. The schooling and suppression of his voice becomes interwoven with his experiences of colonialism and exile. Playing with the biography documentary form, DOH! OH DEAR, A FEMALE TEAR! brackets issues of voice / gender / representation as Stephen traces his westernization, the discovery and silencing of his voice, and people’s reactions in Singapore and North America. Reflecting on the “unsettling” quality of his voice, Stephen decided to exploit the…

  • Explorations of an Unexpected Time Traveler

    Explorations of an Unexpected Time Traveler imagines a narrative where a woman from some undisclosed point in the past experiences continual unexplained and uncontrollable shifts in time and space. Suddenly finding herself in unfamiliar spaces, seemingly devoid of other people, she explores the various regions recording her discoveries through moving image, sound recordings and photographs along the way. Shot in various cities & counties in Alberta; Colorado; and Yukon Territory. Conceived while in Dawson City, Yukon Territory while an Artist in Residence at the Klondike Institute for Art and Culture (KIAC), March 2013. [Installation version includes a series of over…

  • Finding a Place to Sleep

    Based on stories my grandmother told me, I re-imagine while working as a cleaner the experiences of my ancestors during the Holodomor (forced famine) in Ukraine during the Stalinist-Soviet era. The “film” image is re-invented through digital video to enact a sense of ambiguity between authenticity and fiction, as can also be present in the act of oral storytelling. This is one chapter in “Stories for a Future Generation,” a series of shorts which together tell the stories of my family’s and my own migrations, and the inter-generational impacts of those upon our lives and on those of our family’s…

  • Sunspots and Solar Flares

    Sunspots and Solar Flares combines found footage of children dancing from a 1968 Toronto educational film with excerpts of Robin Armstrong’s Nuclear war 1984?

  • The Weight of Snow

    A home movie of a trip to Chernobyl, a dying matriarch and a set of troubling personal circumstances, The Weight of Snow is an essay documenting memory, time and place. A film referencing the tradition of personal travelogue films of The Escarpment School and the essay style of Sans Soleil, The Weight of Snow travels from Canada to Chernobyl from the perspective of a young man exploring radiation in the midst of death, cancer and emotional turmoil. A collection of all techniques used throughout the Lion series, The Weight of Snow is the centerpiece of the work. Echoing the collage…

  • Underground

    Underground presents a performative and re-staged first person documentary portrait of Westminster Station/London Underground, based on footage captured during the time period leading up to and just after the July 7th 2005 transit bombings. Through re-working the original footage, this short piece sets out to explore and present the contradictory moods of the time, from the more official government position of carrying on as usual, to the sense of anxiety felt in the day to day, while highlighting the intangible effects of trauma which shaped the experience of the city and urban space at this time.

  • Trigger Warning:*rape

    Trigger Warning: *rape offers an intimate discussion between two women about their experiences as sexual assault survivors who were raped by female partners.