“In the Kingdom of Shadows” documents a paragraph being typeset on an early twentieth-century Ludlow Linecaster. The text is taken from Maxim Gorky’s 1896 review of the Lumiere Brothers’ film “Arrival of the Train at La Ciotat” (1895). As the words melt into a pool of lead, the alchemical magic of printing is linked to that of cinema. Commissioned by LIFT (Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto) for their 25th anniversary program, “Film is Dead! Long Live Film!” Selected screenings: Ann Arbor Film Festival, 2007; Toronto Worldwide Short Film Festival, 2007
Filter Films
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In the late summer, a young man wanders through an urban park in the late afternoon, seeking a connection to the music and sights around him. He wears a pink shirt. He reads a book, lays down on the grass and has a daydream. As dusk turns to twilight, he reflects on another young man who was in his life.
Pink Shirt
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A woman runs from her memories. After a dangerous accident she slips into her unconscious, where she has to decide whether to live and face her demons or stay floating in the safety of her mind. Shot on Super-8 and then optically printed and manipulated on 16mm, this is a film that tells its story as much through texture and sound as narrative. It features a composition for string quartet composed by the director.
Chaulera
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A smart, fast-paced comedy about sexual competition and identity. Corey and Max compete for the same woman at the grocery store. However, all is not what it seems at the checkout line.
Checkout
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“Pictures of Things That Aren’t There” is an anthology of six works loosely tied together by the circumstance of their making: all were initiated while Daniel was caring for her mother as she lived out her life with a disease that erodes the frontal and temporal lobes of the brain. Her mother’s illness is never more than peripherally addressed. Daniel attends instead to the unnoticed workings of the creative imagination – the capacity of mind she believed her mother had lost. They are small works, made for one person and offered to anyone else who cares to appreciate them. Aesthetic and formal strategies vary according the needs of each piece, on the whole favoring frugality of means and emphasizing the art of making do. Drawing on an admixture of low-cost film and video materials, Daniel turns the simple interplay of pared-down cinematic elements – word and image, hearing and seeing, figure and ground, movement and stillness, document and story – into surprisingly resonant works. Each a stand-alone work in its own right, together they form a constellation of poignant meditations on the relationship between the creative imagination and our sense of self, of longing, and of loss.
Pictures of Things That Aren’t There
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A beautifully understated work that creates an almost palpable sense of absence through a simple interplay of word and image.
Two Hummingbirds
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A hand-tinted hand-processed film loop dances with an obsolete low-tech telecine transfer machine to the underscore of a filtered soundscape. A portrait of the filmmaker in several inferences at once, with a nod to a few of her influences.
Figure on the Ground, A
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An ode to our imaginative and creative instincts, “Two Unrelated Shots” is simply the outcome of a need to make something.
Two Unrelated Shots
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“In 1973, General Augusto Pinochet launched a violent coup in Chile that overthrew the Marxist elected president Salvador Allende. Thousands were killed, tortured, imprisoned, and exiled as a result. My family was among the many that were exiled in Canada.” – Francisca Duran In this experimental, autobiographical film, a young woman remembers and recounts difficult childhood memories of the 1973 coup in Chile when her family was forced into exile.
Cuentos de Mi Ninez (Tales from My Childhood)
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Built from artifacts recovered from her own then her mother’s storage closet, “Confessions of a Compulsive Archivist” follows the filmmaker’s tragic-comic struggle to let go of a few things of obviously no use to her. Part found footage film, part camera-less video, it turns stuff that should have been thrown out long ago into a poignant study of the relationship between the creative imagination and our attachments, be they material or emotional. “[One of] about a dozen superlative selections by women, [and an example of] an intriguing crop of new video works examining the medium’s widespread, elemental function as a kind of experiential logbook.” – David Balzer, Cinemascope.
Confessions of a Compulsive Archivist
