Notes towards a compost-based vision. World premiere at Crossroads Festival (San Francisco, CA, 2018)
Filter Films
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In “Palmerston Blvd.”, Dan Browne invites the audience into the intimate space of his living room in this portrait of a bay window recorded over the course of a year. Gradual shifts in the interior and exterior environments mark the passing of the seasons, a slow dance of objects and light juxtaposed by the rapid speeds of bodies and the urban landscape, revealing the processes inherent in all things. Selected Screenings: Toronto International Film Festival, Wavelengths Programme, 2017 (Toronto, ON); Antimatter Media Art Festival, 2017 (Victoria, BC)
Palmerston Blvd.
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Wigs: shoulder length or long, naturally curled or straight. Shoes: pink glittery six-inch heels or black shiny two-inch heels. Nipples: stick on dime or dollar sized. A vibrant mesh of items line the shelves of one of Toronto’s oldest cross-dressing stores. Opened in 1987, Wildside was one of the only places to offer a full male-to-female transformation through makeup, clothing and hair. Still open today, Take a Walk on the Wildside provides viewers with a glimpse into a day in the life of the store. As five customers pass through, we peek into their colorful lives and reasons for visiting. While customers come and go, storeowner Paddy consistently offers warm and welcoming service. As we witness heartfelt interaction, it becomes clear that Wildside is much more than just a store and Paddy more than a storeowner. In an age where items can be purchased easily and tutorials accessed online, “Take a Walk on the Wildside” shows why the store acts as safe and important space for its clientele. Winner of Best Documentary Short at the 6th Annual Canadian Screen Awards, 2018..
Take a Walk on the Wildside
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In the year 2076, a cyborg finds moving images made by their great-grandmother in the last years of celluloid. Looking at the images, they are struck by the past, causing them to dig into their own memories, history, and identity. Gleaned from images from the filmmaker’s life, 2076 looks at the ways in which familial history and queer identity are communicated through the archive/photographic image. Topically situated as the analog image is quickly disappearing, this film explores its virtues, illustrating the ways in which the past imbues small moments with power and glimpses of our past can speak and serve as catharsis to our present.
2076 (Elegy)
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With a moving-image practice spanning 30 years and a stalwart, ongoing dedication to the molding of young artist minds at OCAD University, Toronto-based media artist Wrik Mead is truly a local hero. His distinct short-form works combine an animator’s patience with the reflexivity of the DIY psychodrama, producing brilliant first-person narratives of desire, difference and accommodation. Mead’s intelligent, sensitive parables are an intoxicating, visceral mix of painstaking pixillation, fairy-tale allegory and queer-identity. – Christine Lucy Latimer, Pleasure Dome Local Hero Programme includes the following titles: What Isabelle Wants (1987, super 8/16mm blowup, 3 minutes) Warm (1992, super 8/16mm blowup, 5 minutes) Closet Case (1995, super 8/16mm blowup, 3.5 minutes) Frostbite (1996, super 8/16mm/video, 16mm blowup,12 minutes) Guise (1997, 16mm on digital video, 10 minutes) Manipulator (2002, 16mm on digital video, 4 minutes) grotesque (2002, 16mm on digital video, 7.5 minutes) Filth (2004, 16mm on digital video, 4.5 minutes) bare (2008, digital video, 3 minutes) prick (2008, digital video, 3 minutes) winter’s end (2010, digital video, 7.5 minutes) summer 1975 (2014, digital video, 10 minutes)
Local Hero Programme
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Emotionally drained after learning of the death of her long estranged sister, an elderly woman spends the day lost somewhere between her past and present and her conscious and subconscious mind. In this state, she ponders the inevitabilities of life, death and the hereafter. “Mount Misery” won Best Film prize at the Black International Cinema, Berlin film festival, 2017.
Mount Misery
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BELÉN is a story about the consequences of experiencing a profound inspiration. The inspiration that one woman, a humble cocoa farmer and musician from a small Afro-Venezuelan village, unaware of her powers, generated in her community and in people all over the American continent, during her life, and after her death as a spiritual being. Queen of the Quitipla. Master of bamboo’s sounds and silences. Core and bridge to the African American community, to its connected beats and historical fights. A trip into the puzzled reminiscences of this woman’s life (and death), captured through more than 100 hours of amateur found footage, and expressed through the mirrored gestures of multiple points of view. An unusual musical portrait filled with personal and collective resonant rituals; a path to understand the power of music, and modest authentic actions, for social transformation.
Belen
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Unfolding to the melancholy strains of piano and accordion, which recall the dramatic live accompaniment of the silent cinema, “Fettered” is a lyrical tale of an Icarus-like man who attempts to realize his dreams of flight by constructing his own fragile wings. Scenes of dream-like heroism are contrasted with mundane reality. Coupled with the frozen lifelessness of glass-bound museum birds, and the awkward flight of animated photographs, this creates a picture of a man’s attempts to capture a futile ambition.
Fettered
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A personal landscape film of time and memory and a porch. A time-tunnel of moments and experiences.
South Lakewood North
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“Richard Martin deconstructs the process of montage, exploring a sequence of a TV movie, revealing the central conventions of the genre and its raw, rhythmic and mesmerizing predictability”. – Les Rencontres Internationales Paris, 2016
ABCAM
