A skilled programmer commences work for Galatea, a robotics company launching the next generation of personal companions. Unlike generic robot companions, the C-1000 is made to a client’s precise specifications, which either give the companion a unique personality and complex individuality, or replicate those of someone else… Against the backdrop of activist protests over outsourcing emotional connection, the programmer brings a C-1000 “to life” through trial and error. Using photographs as her guide, she trains the artificial companion to adopt the mannerisms of its original, from the basics, like holding a pen and writing, to advance concepts, like flirtation and passion— the most adept way to flip hair over a shoulder, the perfect amount of time to let eye contact linger when removing a blouse. The programmer is pleased with her progress, but, despite routine doses of potent memory-suppressants, the programmer cannot repress her recollections of now-gone sweet nothings and tender moments with her lost love. As the release date approaches, the programmer is confronted with the moral implications of her work, and is forced to choose between maintaining her integrity and protecting her livelihood.
Filter Films
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When Breanna was 12 years old, she discovered opera and began exploring and acknowledging her gender identity. At age 25, she is the first transgender woman to complete a Masters in Opera at a major conservatory. The film traces the days leading up to her graduation recital while harkening back to the defining moments of her girlhood.
Mezzo
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“In this strikingly poetic documentary about memory, loss and brotherly love, we find Jimmy, guided by the memory and words of his grandfather, preparing a soup for his beloved brother Danny, who passed away one year ago.” — imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival (2016) Image description: Two hands holding old photos as someone looks at them. On top is a black-and-white headshot of an Indigenous boy, smiling and looking sharp in a checked shirt. Below is a colour photo of three older Indigenous women posing in a yard or field.
Soup For My Brother
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“Faust Part 2”reveals the modern Faust in a romantic interlude, an idyll (from the Greek idein, “to see”); also, a journey of the id. A sense of story is inferred through the complex interweaving of human gesture, expression, and bodily movement within vibrantly shifting colours and rhythmic development, creating multiple levels of metaphorical meaning. A collaborative work with paintings by Emily Ripley and soundtrack by Joel Haertling. (SB)
Faust’s Other: An Idyll
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The second in a series of “quilt films” that pay homage to the work of pioneering female artists, “Athyrium filix-femina” reimagines Anna Atkins’ founding work in photography as a moving image. In 1843, Anna Atkins published the first book of photography, “Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions”, an exploration of regional botany that classified different kinds of algae using direct prints of the plants. The cyanotype process was a relatively short-lived as a dominant form of photography, however, it found refuge in the domestic sphere where it was used to decorate fabric for pillows, drapes and clothing. By combining filmmaking and quilting, this film extends from the “domestication” of this photographic art by exploring experimental narrative and structural forms through the use of traditional “women’s work.” The “narrative” in this film is told through the symbolic patterning in quilt-making practices. (The first quilt, c: won eyed jail (2005) screened at Views from the Avant Garde. It was my thesis project for the Bard MFA…https://vimeo.com/53054730). Even more than my first quilt film, “c: won eyed jail” (2005), “Athyrium filix-femina” combines structural filmmaking and process-based techniques in order to bring materiality of filmmaking to the forefront—but also with emphasis on the handmade aspects of the art form. I made the cyanotype emulsion from scratch using Atkin’s original cyanotype recipe from 1842. I coated the clear leader, exposed the film to sun (sometimes for an excess of 2 hours) and processed the film by hand in order to make this one print/quilt. The images are a combination of photograms of plants (an homage to Atkins botanical images) and direct prints of found footage (that tells the story of a young girl tormented by a gang of bullies and an imprisoned spider). By adapting and reframing historical photographic processes to highlight the unique temporality and liveness of film, this project explores not only its materiality of film, but also the interface between the histories and discourses of film and photography.
Athyrium filix-femina
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In his personal essay film, filmmaker Jonathan Wysocki searches for the meaning behind his lifelong obsession with the movie ‘Jaws.’ Wysocki recounts the terror that kept him out of the ocean during his childhood and the dark desire that drew him back as an adult. He returns to the ocean to discover a fear deeper than the shark stalking his imagination.
A Doll’s Eyes
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Inside his New York bedroom, Dustin plans to celebrate his third anniversary with Colby by making a sex tape, but the scene that unfolds isn’t quite what they’ve scripted in the sharply observed “Raw Footage” – Frameline.org
Raw Footage
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Elliot can’t cry and he needs to. He’s recently been dumped by his ex- girlfriend, who has decided she wants to exclusively date “real” men. His mother is descending deeper and deeper into the progression of her Alzheimer’s disease. And the testosterone he takes regularly seems to have made his body forget how to grieve. “Tear Jerker” is a portrait of a transgender guy faced with difficult life circumstances trying to find new ways to express old and familiar feelings.
Tear Jerker
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Assembly is a short film that illustrates the struggle of the working class in Peru, in relation to the global workers movement. The grainy images, canted shots, still images and Russian montages offer a captivating five minutes of social reality in the fight against Neoliberalism. This film was commissioned by the Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto (LIFT) with the goal to capture the spirit of Super 8 and celebrate LIFT’s 30th anniversary.
Assembly
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Dark Adaptation extends the experiments with alternative optical systems I began in Refraction Series (2008). These films are rooted in the experiments and writings of Ibn Al-Haytham and Isaac Newton, pioneering investigators of the nature of sight and light. In them I use fundamental phenomena such as refraction and thin-film interference to create images of pure prismatic colour in motion. Dark Adaptation is both a true representation of a series of tiny performances with light that were recorded by the camera, and an analogue for an interior journey. The music is by Graham Stewart of Violence and the Sacred. “Dark Adaptation… provides nothing but color, liquid and striated as it filters across the screen. Very reminiscent of the abstract mandala films of Jordan Belson, Dark Adaptation frequently prompts a viewer to wonder just how Gehman got these semi-solid colorforms onto celluloid…. [N]ot so much a movie you follow or decipher as it is a bliss-out tranceformer.” (Michael Sicinski, mubi notebook, Sept. 9, 2016) Dark Adaptation received its world premiere at the 2016 Toronto International Film Festival.
Dark Adaptation
