“In 1996, my 16mm film ‘Hitler!’ screened at the London International Film Festival, not far from where its subject, my brother, was born. In this way, Niall Holden, who has been institutionalized for over 25 years, has travelled around the world. “This is the final film in a trilogy about my relationship with my severely schizophrenic brother. ‘Hitler! (Revisited)’ is a partly hands-on, partly digital, ‘re-mix’ of the earlier film. With the assistance of film-maker Sol Nagler, I literally deconstructed a print of the earlier film, separating it back into individual shots, which we then put through a variety of physical stresses and tortures. While we did so, So l asked me questions about my family, and we discussed filmmaking, his own family history in the Warsaw Ghetto, Hitler, and the war. I wrote the work’s text, and digitally re-edited the new images with a soundtrack from sound artist Steve Bates, in response to this initial process.”

“In the summer of 1982, during a visit to the my hometown of Victoria, I witnessed the murder of a teenage girl – killed by a sniper on a quiet, suburban street, in the middle of the afternoon. I returned a year later to lie with my camera on the spot where she died, and to roam the neighbourhood searching for footage. The title of this film comes from the oft-quoted statistic that the average sixteen-year-old has witnessed 18,000 murders, on TV and at the movies. ‘Gordon Head’ is the Canadian suburb where the film takes place. “The original footage for ‘18,000 Dead in Gordon Head’ was shot in Super 8 film. However, before it could be edited the footage was lost, and it wasn’t until twenty years later that I found a crude VHS video dub. This wrecked, out-of-sync and damaged footage, with its strobing, water colour-like hues, was evocative of the my marred and murky memories of the original event. It inspired the writing of a narrative poem, and finally formed the basis of this completed 35mm film. “In 1982, as remarkable as the girl’s sudden death was, I also found it devastatingly normal. I’d already seen it, thousands of times. The state of shock that it engendered, was simply more of the same, a state of mind very familiar. As was the ensuing series of violent events that I went on to witness – until… a small, positive action broke the spell. “‘18,000 Dead in Gordon Head’ is partly a treatise on the omnipresence of violence in contemporary culture, even (or especially) in the banal context of a Canadian suburb. Composed as a poem, the final work is a hybrid of several film stocks and video formats, processed to create a kinetic, lyrical collage of textures, loops, rhythms and visual rhymes, and in the end finally completing the work’s cycle back to its intended film format.”

“An homage to ‘Sesame Street,’ it was made with a brief loop of Super 8 footage shot across the Strait of Juan de Fuca – just 14 miles from Victoria to the Washington State coast and Bangor (the world’s largest nuclear submarine base and a primary Cold War target). “This hilltop view was many things to us while growing up: a place to peer out at the dark with a date, tongue-tied; a place to see the first flash of a long expected nuclear strike; a place to almost hear the bombs dropping on far-off Pacific villages; and up in the sky, F’s dancing. “Note: In theatres the rhythmic looping employed in this work produces a strobing effect, somewhat like an atomic detonation on the horizon. Although I would never set out to antagonize my audience, it is nevertheless moving to see, from above in the projectionist’s booth, some audience members reach to protect their eyes, their raised arms silhouetted in the pulsating room.” Music by Christine Fellows. (Bombs dropped by U.S. Air Force on Vietnam, 1967.)

“Made with a camera the size of a deck of cards carried in my pants pocket for one year, the ‘White City’ beckons, repulses and quakes with portent. The original poem was commissioned by CBC Radio in 2002 on the theme, ‘Love in Winnipeg’ – it began at 3 am in mid-February at 30 below, on a drive home through an empty, wind-swept, snowbound city. An audience member in my home town asked me why this film in particular was so dark, so sad. I said I didn’t find it to be so, but I wish I’d said something to her about the beauty to be found in desolation.” Music by Christine Fellows.