Made as an experiment in hand-processing, the film cycles through five different film stocks and a variety of processing methods. The result created dimensional havoc in the images. The concept of inside and outside is troubled, and the act of enclosure creates a screen on which to project the filmmaker’s own image. Selected screenings: Wavelengths Programme, Toronto International Film Festival, Toronto, ON, 2007
Filter Films
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“‘Pool’ is a touching portrait of a community attempting to rebuild and heal itself following the devastating 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami that shocked the world. The titular swimming pool is a temporary makeshift basin created to help the children of Aceh, Indonesia, face their fear of water and learn to swim again, despite the losses their community suffered when the sea came crashing in. Chong Chan Fui observes their progress with affection and a poet’s eye.” – Andrea Picard, Toronto International Film Festival In Indonesian, Acehnese and English with English subtitles. Awards: Winner of the Award for Best Canadian Short, Toronto International Film Festival, 2007. Named one of the Top Ten Canadian Short Films of 2007 by the Toronto International Film Group.
Kolam (Pool)
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Jake and Sabrina, two heterosexuals, struggle find love in a world where they just don’t fit in. Follow this comedic yet poignant look at how life might be if the world was predominately gay and straight people were the “queer” ones.
Love Is Love
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This hand-painted work six years in the making (37 in the studying of the “The Divine Comedy”) demonstrates the earthly conditions of “Hell,” “Purgatory” (or Transition) and “Heaven” (or “existence is song,” which is the closest I’d presume upon heaven from my experience) as well as the mainspring of/from “Hell” (Hell Spit Flexion) in four parts which are inspired by the closed-eye or hypnogogic vision created by those emotional states. Original painted on IMAX and Cinemascope 70mm and 35mm, these paint-laden rolls have been carefully rephotographed and translated to 35mm and 16mm compilations by Dan Yankosky of Western Cine. (Stan Brakhage)
Dante Quartet, The
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In 2002-2003, San Francisco composer Jack Curtis Dubowsky moved to a fifth-floor walk-up in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. This semi-verité musical video by Todd Wilson (Under One Roof), shot entirely in one day, documents the great dilemmas of NYC life. Go to the survival job, or attend a business meeting with a potential client (portrayed by real-life client and director Elizabeth Elson [Born in a Barn])? Eat lunch or scavange? How hot is it outside? How to afford a gym? And, the greatest mystery of all, if this is an “E train running on the F line,” is it an E or an F?
NYC Dilemma
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“Like many of Wrik Mead’s previous films, ‘toybox’ combines creepiness and playfulness in a series of animations that manipulate the most misused toy of all – the penis. Stripped of eros and emotion, Mead’s scenarios of sex-gone-mad play with the absurd qualities of an appendage and a desire that has a mind of its own, and a drive so strong that it leads to self-destruction. Wrik Mead’s animated film plays with his own box of experimental toys, combining all of this talented filmmaker’s previous techniques – pixilation, claymation, stop-motion and cut-outs – in a series of video shorts tied together with new digital sampling experiments drawn from the seedy and sometimes sad world of men’s sexual play.” – Julia Creet
toybox
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Without Snow, we lit up the season like never before. Part of “Twenty Five Short Films in and about Saskatchewan.”
Brown Christmas with Colour
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A series of line drawings of a girl are inter-cut with black-and-white Japanese-inspired landscapes and textbook diagrams of electromagnetic waveforms, over which are animated organic materials such as star anise, lavender, poppy seeds, and cranberries. Created for the song by Flotilla.
Secret Love
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“This lyrical and impressionistic rumination on the filmmaker’s Bulgarian heritage explores the impact of family and tradition, the links between the old world and the new, and the simple, lovely gestures that unite generations.” – Hot Docs International Documentary Film Festival, Toronto In 1913, Sophia and Dimitry Makedonsky were teenagers when they left the Ukraine for the United States. Growing up in the Midwest, filmmaker LeAnn Erickson often heard stories of the “old country” her grandparents had left behind. As Erickson travels to Russia, the search for her sense of “place” sparks a re-examination of her family’s immigrant past. Her own return to America sets in motion an interior journey that leads her to discover a new vision of an “old country.” Through immigrant memories, real and imagined, “Folk Songs” explores issues of personal identity and their connection to land, language and belonging.
Folk Songs
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On a sunny afternoon between dreaming and waking a couple come together and move apart in the interior world of their home. A hand-processed black-and-white queer experimental film exploring the tension between intimacy and separateness.
Sleep Lines
