Language: English

  • Rough Blazing Star

    A new experimental documentary film project from artist/filmmaker Christopher Wiersema examines anarchism, local history and memory, Emma Goldman’s writing, and a shared love of flowers. Told through a poetic inquiry and response to the text and research – beginning with a visit to the Old Labor Hall in Barre, Vermont – the social center of the Italian anarchist and socialist community in the early 1900’s.

  • Gags N’ Gals: Male Order

    A short experimental film inspired by the paintings of biblical women from German Renaissance painter, Lucas Cranach. The film reimagines Cranach’s paintings through a modern, critical lens, exploring female sensuality and their ability to use it as their own personal weapons.

  • Why is water so heavy? vol i. time never changed water

    In part of an ongoing autobiographical-fictional collection entitled “Why is water so heavy?” (c. 2022-present), interlocking the fluidity and borderless nature of water in relation to diaspora and landmarking. I dwell on self-ambiguity as time continues to spatialize fragments of my ancestral histories and cultural practices lost in water.

  • Memory Rituals [Part One]: Memory of Trees

    Memory Rituals [Part One]: Memory of Trees three-screen video, 5.44 minutes, made with support from Media City Film Festival’s Chrysalis Fellowship 2023. Thinking about remembering, about forgetting, and about the memory of trees. [more info: https://cbattle.com/memory-rituals-part-one-memory-of-trees/]

  • Toronto, Old and New

    Allegedly “bursting at the seams” for over a century now, Toronto is cacophonous, cosmopolitan, and often confusing. A landscape shaped by generations of dreams and desires, the metropolis bears the overlapping imprints of capitalism, colonialism, conflict, community and celebration. Juxtaposing found footage, paper ephemera, and newly shot 16mm material, “Toronto, Old and New” explores the relationship between past and present in Canada’s largest city.

  • Łódź:22592

    A recently published book by Toronto’s Art Gallery of Ontario, profiling the resurrected photographs made clandestinely by Henryk Ross ( 1910-1991) in Poland’s Lodz ghetto, inspires the filmmaker to wonder once again, how his father survived those turbulent, WW II years in Poland. Filmed in the USA, Canada and Poland. Sound begins at 8:02

  • 24 Cards

    A tribute to film critic, writer, visual artist and filmmaker, Donald Richie who from the early 1980’s until 2013 was a friend and mentor. In his writing and curating, Donald Richie was instrumental in introducing Japanese Cinema to Western audiences. These yearly post cards, hand written or typed with unique personal images were one form of communication between the filmmaker and Mr. Richie. The film is SILENT.

  • meditations on a process

    An experimental documentary exploring the filmmakers’ mutual interests in spirituality, imprints of childhood, and ecologies of presence in personal filmmaking practices, bookended by poetry that situates their musings in a rapidly changing Toronto.

  • Aka Deadlee

    Launching his career in 2000, Deadlee is one of the world’s first gay rappers who still struggles to be heard today.

  • The Blactor

    On route to a “gansta” audition, a young Black actress must prove to a cop that she’s not the role she’s auditioning for.