“Concrete and Sunshine” is a documentary about the human geography of incarceration which challenges the function of the prison system. Arguing that an underlying problem of incarceration is the isolation of the individual from the rest of society, “Concrete and Sunshine” focuses on interviews with men housed in 24-hours of solitary confinement in California’s “super-max” prison, Pelican Bay State Prison. Cousino questions the motives for the use of solitary confinement and the impact it has on the individuals celled within. Additionally, “Concrete and Sunshine” relates the penal system’s use of solitary to the economic isolation experienced by both communities that have requested a prison for financial gain and those who have lost too many individuals to the prison system. The theme of isolation provokes questions about the role of the individual in society and our own relationship to the state as a collective body.
Filter Films
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A meditation on birth, silence and the American cinema, sealed with a kiss. A single gesture into light.
In the Dark
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A wealthy landowner battles his wayward son in a southern gothic story of power, sex and cruelty, set in 19th-century South Carolina. A harsh, unflinching look at the results of racism and abuse.
Obedience
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Sometimes, rifts between us are as wide as rivers, and sometimes, as small as hair lines. Using bleaching and painting techniques on found footage, “Two Eastern Hair Lines” explores communication, conflict and isolation. “West of the pass you will meet no more old friends.” – Tang Dynasty poem Awards: Jutra Nomination for Best Animation, 2004
Two Eastern Hair Lines
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“Enduring a dysfunctional family requires stamina, wit and sharp survival instincts, as demonstrated in this anguished ode to family peculiarity. A pixilated tale of a girl whose off-kilter parents become lost in a mission to nurse a raccoon – an unfortunate road-kill victim.” – Images Festival, 2004 AWARDS: Images Prize for Best Canadian Media Artwork in the Festival, Images Festival of Independent Film and Video, Toronto, 2004
Kill Road
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“Fartasia” was made by running film through a sewing machine. The result is, as the filmmaker says, “surprisingly organic.”
Fartasia
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“Susan Oxtoby’s film “All Flesh Is Grass” is one of the most aptly tragic visions of life-on-earth I’ve recently seen – one of the most perfect step-printed hand-held (hold your hand’s eye) pain’s taking orders-of-metaphor perhaps yet created through any conscious arrangement of symbols inasmuch as Susan evolves much of the aesthetic of Arthur Lipsett free of his symbolic cynicism; and she holds the camera personally to her ‘heart’ in a way Joseph Cornell would have, I’m sure, had he been able to work with the camera directly: in other words she has not distanced herself by using ‘found footage’ and/or by directing other’s camera work in the making of these visions, but has rather followed the trail of images close to her heart clear through every disjunct of step-print and edit of thought along a line of simple (and simply) human empathy at-(metaphorical)-large.” – Stan Brakhage This film is dedicated to the memory of the filmmaker’s mother, who died in 1980 after a three-year battle with cancer.
All Flesh Is Grass
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Super 8 footage of deserted and destroyed family businesses along the lonely Trans-Canada Highway accompanies a haunting song about betrayal and loss. Originally made for the 2002 Splice This! Super 8 Film Festival, Toronto.
Mayo Jar
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Intoxication, stillness and desire unfold from a train in Frankfurt to a room in Vienna. A woman (Urda) and a man (Bone) on separate travels meet. Their affects mingle, creating a zone between their bodies in which something happens. Something that belongs to neither one nor the other, but is a third creation. Somewhere between dreaming and being awake, where possibilities are held and lost. This is Urda/Bone. Music by Sparklehorse. Produced with the support of the National Film Board of Canada (FAP) and the Ontario Arts Council (OAC).
Urda/Bone
