Language: English

  • 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.

  • Behemoth (six legs good, two legs bad)

    Behemoth (six legs good, two legs bad) is an animated film featuring six bee genera. Made using animated stills, Super-8 and 16mm footage, optical printing, and cameraless techniques.

  • Dreams of Gold

    “Out at Zeballos, on the wet west coast of Vancouver Island, it rains and rains and practically never stops, but the people there don’t look for rainbows in the sky” Based on text from a gold miner’s journal, Dreams of Gold reveals his dreams and hallucinations while exploring the image of the mind as rooms in a house.

  • Orgy of the Blood Parasites

    J. G. Ballard’s novel High-Rise and Cronenberg’s film Shivers, both of which detail an apartment building’s descents into chaos, were released in 1975, creating a collision in history as fascinating as it is bizarre. Both are about non-normative sex in imposing spatialities and both are visions of disturbed surrealist dystopia of body mutations. Later in his career, in 1996, Cronenberg adapted a J. G. Ballard novel with the fetishistic film Crash, but in Shivers, dread and disgust circulate spatially around the apartment complex on Nun’s Island, next to the city of Montréal, to which I have returned. I bring together…

  • The Places We Lived

    The Places We Lived uses a large family archive of Super8 and digital home movies from the mid-1970s to late 1990s to grapple with the hopes, dreams, and disappointments of two South American immigrants who moved to Montreal in the wake of the excitement and optimism generated by Expo ’67. This story focuses on the father, Jose (“Pepe”), whose life in Canada followed four hardscrabble decades in Chile. A story about childhood and fatherhood, aging, capitalism, and obsolescence, The Places We Lived opens up new questions about class, memory, diasporic narratives, and the complicated histories of migration and exile.

  • HOW YOU SEE ME

    Drawn from lived experiences and memories, HOW YOU SEE ME tells the story of a Chinese girl navigating her thoughts on white beauty standards. She seeks to understand her relationship to them, and express the damaging effects and harm that fetishizing Asian women causes.

  • K-SARAM I: Tale of the pig head

    Centered around the Koryo-saram community in Rostov-on-Don, Russia, the film displays a shamanistic memorial ancestral ritual „Jesa”, encompassing the collective memory of Korean diaspora, the wish of the Koryo-saram for a unification of South and North Korea, and showing the real appearance of the ghosts of migrants whose transformation to spirits was not succeeded. “Saram” means human in Korean. The title refers to the today very popular K-export- products like K-Drama, K-Pop, K-Beauty, etc. and to the name that the Soviet-Korean diaspora uses instead of the South-Korean term “Koryo-In”. Approximately 500,000 ethnic Koreans reside in the former Soviet Union. Most…

  • Pappy’s Garden

    A personal tribute to the filmmaker’s grandfather, a first-generation immigrant to Toronto, Canada from Jamaica in the 1950s. Through both digital and super 8mm found family footage, Mike’s past catches up with him as he struggles with difficult memories from his childhood in Jamaica, finding comfort in his spectacularly over-grown garden.

  • Petal to the Metal

    This hand-processed 16mm film reflects on botanical animism. It is a song written for night-crawlers, compost, and shadows, inspired by human flower-lust. Water, fire, earth and air are interwoven with the garden’s creature crew. The work draws a parallel between the photographic alchemy of cinematic experiments and the photosynthetic processes of plants. Honourable mention, Top Canadian Short Jury Award, GIRAF 17 (2021).

  • From Tanzania, With Love

    After appearing in a remake of the Macklemore & Ryan Lewis hit single “Same Love”, Dayon Monson is forced to flee her home in Tanzania. Facing extreme persecution for identifying as trans and promoting LGBTQ human rights, Dayon connects with Rainbow Railroad in hopes of seeking asylum in Canada. This is her story.