Mirage

Mirage offers a thoughtful and disturbing meditation on a wide variety of cinematic problems - the portrayal of women in film, the ability of a reassuring male commentary ("Dreams come true in Blue Hawaii") to direct our gaze and our conventions of fantasy/dreamland. The film tests ones ability to pay attention. We keep seeing essentially the same image and hearing the same phrase yet we have a difficulty grasping what this film is about. The film has a mystery or haunting feeling to it that perhaps surfaces after one has seen it, and is the basis of thought on the subject of the sexual portrayal of women on film.

Mirage could be seen many times; perhaps the tail could be spliced to the head resulting in a continuous loop - as there is no clear beginning, middle, or end to the film - somewhat like the nature of our own existence. - Martin Rumsby

Mixed Signals

A scrambled satellite signal blurs televised images into a kaleidoscope of sound and colour to starkly portray the co-option of religious dogma for profit and political gain.

Murmuration

Murmuration is a black and white poetic study of the starling. Using animated live action, and optically printed images, the filmmaker muses on the destiny of "sturnis vulgaris," deplored conqueror of continents.

Narrows Inlet

From a boat swaying on its anchor at the head of an inlet, a landscape of pilings, shore, and forest is slowly revealed by time-lapse photography as the morning fog lifts. While the deep space of the landscape emerges out of the fog-enshrouded flatness of early morning, the camera skips from fixed point to fixed point, suggesting the motion of the human eye while reading.

New Shoes: An Interview in Exactly Five Minutes

This film presents a candid portrait of a male-female relationship that terminated with dire consequences.

The Nine O'Clock Gun

A famous Vancouver landmark, the nine o'clock gun is a cannon that fires each day at 9:00 p.m. from Stanley Park. In this film, a stationary camera plays a waiting game, shooting the "performing sculpture" that marks time, but also stands as an invention of destruction.

nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands

In a visual interpretation of this avant-garde poem by e.e. cummings, poetic hand movesments of ASL/Art-Sign emphasize the dexterous quality of the poet's perspective, creating an innovative visual interpretation in harmony with the poem.

notes in origin

Made in and near a farm house in northern Alberta, this film takes the structural findings of Ellie Epp's earlier work, Trapline, to a new edge by using long-take shots divided by black leader.

Overview

An experimental video that provides a mysterious view of a city, featuring a soundscape evoking place and memory.

Padayatra (Walking Meditation)

A meditation on the act of walking, combining the photographic image with hauntingly beautiful hand-painted images applied directly onto the surface of 35mm clear film. Original electronic soundtrack by composer Dennis Burke.

Painting Catfights

A painter, performer and filmmaker explores society's fascination with female conflict while questioning her motivation to do so.

Pioneers of X-Ray Technology (a film about grandpa)

Pioneers of X-Ray Technology is a portrait of the filmmaker's grandfather, Dr. Ernest To, a 91-year-old Chinese man who watched Hong Kong enter the twentieth century while he voraciously made images as a photographer, moviemaker, and radiologist

Plastic Surgery

Plastic Surgery is a hyperbolic tract on the exploitation of nature by man. Plastic Surgery becomes a grand metaphor for filmmaking: degraded optically-printed images of actual surgery on the body of the filmmaker "cut" to a knife ripping celluloid.

Pleasure Film (Ahmed's Story)

Talented Canadian actor Valerie Buhagiar tells a story about an intriguing Iranian man living in Vancouver. She recounts a powerful and symbolic tale that emerged from his dreams.

Real Italian Pizza

Selected moments from eight months of street life outside a Manhattan pizza parlour, as seen from a fourth-floor loft.

Seashore

"The basic image derives from a shot depicting women in (Edwardian era) dresses standing along the edge of the ocean. Within this eight second loop, he cuts shorter ones. For example, the activity of a central group of three women is cut so that the figures repeat certain motions over and over again ..."
     - Kristina Nordstrom

Seeing in the Rain

Shot through the windshield of a Vancouver city bus, Seeing in the Rain transforms the linear narrative of an ordinary bus ride by inserting images from past and future to the rhythm of the bus's windshield wipers.

shambhala alley

shambhala alley is a meditation on mortality, and the fact of death makes each moment sacred.

Sheol

Computer graphics and elaborate time-lapse control movement create a surrealistic experience in this work inspired by debates on the afterlife.

Sisyphus

Sisyphus is a powerful interpretation of the ancient Greek myth of the same name. Dancers struggle to reach their destination by hurling themselves at a wall and building human pyramids.

Snake Hips Lulu

When Lulu Keating moved to Dawson City, Yukon, she wondered if she might be the reincarnation of a dance hall girl of the Klondike Gold Rush, Snake Hips Lulu. Keating's reflections on her life, devoted to the sexual revolution, reveal startling similarities.

SNARE

This evocative performance by Anishinaabe filmmaker Lisa Jackson pays tribute to the quiet dignity of Indigenous women and draws attention to the plight of over 1,100 who are missing and murdered in Canada.  

SO KAT'TA

This artistic collaboration between dancer Rachel Harris and artist Tsuneko Kokubo explores the beauty of nature in an exquisite dance performance. Filmed in the British Columbia interior, it is both a celebration of the earth and a reflection on the fragility of water and the natural environment.

Sourdough Starter

Sourdough Starter is an animated musical tribute to discovering love and leavening.

South Lakewood North

A poetic exploration of time and the landscape from a veranda on South Lakewood Street in Vancouver.