A film-poem of an ecology of sings that speak of a colonial history repeating itself. Subalterns become masters, antiques become reproducible dinner sets, exotic birds become luxury currency, exploration becomes extreme-sport-tourism, monuments become geo-data. A spherical voyage eastwards and westwards marking cycles of expansion in a struggle to find one’s place, one’s sitting around a table. “An ecology of signs lurking amid seductive 16mm travel footage echoes with post-colonial reverberations in Ana Vaz’s deceptively corrosive, award-winning Occidente. – ANDRÉA PICARD (TIFF, Wavelengths)
Filter Films
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“In his most ravishing and heartbreaking work, Arriaga ventures again to his native Peru in search of a lost friend. Along the way he encounters the faces of those who speak about wounds that cannot heal—survivors recounting the deaths and disappearances of their beloveds during Peru’s civil war that pitted the communists of The Shining Path against the government, with both sides aligned against the people. “The dead have called us to find them,” remarks Lida Flores de Huaman, and Marcos follows her evocation, cutting memory trails into Peru that bring back the names of the disappeared. Using frames that are strong and tender, steady and compassionate, he summons a community of memorials that dare to remember.” —Pleasure Dome (http://pdome.org/2016/memory-trails-the-works-of-marcos-arriaga/)
Looking For Carmen
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Tale of Winter focuses on the societal indifference towards homeless people. One the of the biggest challenges of ours times is the lack of empathy towards the underprivileged, the poor, the deranged: the people who live on the margins of the society but who are often treated as if they are invisible, ignorable or as if they are nuisances. With Tale of Winter, I would like to draw attention to how much and how easily we disregard that which is right in front of us, that which call for our sensitivity and understanding.
Tale Of Winter
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When the filmmaker’s grandmother was 19, she was taken from Soviet Ukraine to Germany to work on a Bavarian farm under National Socialism. She had the luck and perseverance to survive hardships of the forced famine in her homeland and forced labour in the new one. The stories of her everyday life – learning how to milk a cow, falling in love – are interspersed with three generations of reflections on politics, longing, feelings of displacement and loss. Hand-processed black & white film, colour film, photographs and official documents create a montage of different perspectives. The hand-touch aesthetic combines with the acousmatic effect of disembodied voices, in this deeply intimate portrait obscured by memory loss, mis-translation, fear and trauma.
Learning To Milk A Cow
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Since airplanes did not exist, people moved around using prayers, they went from one land to another and returned early, before dawn. In old audio recordings, the voices of pastors speak of the mythical existence of witches and their travels. In the daily life of a woman the magic of her tales begin to materialize as night falls. Night is the time when travel is possible.
Neither God Nor Santa Maria
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“Eye of the Mask” reveals for Canadian audiences another view of life in Nicaragua. Set against the backdrop of the 1979 Sandinista revolution and the continuing contra attacks, many Nicaraguans were involved in the resurgence of popular theatre. It’s theatre based on both folkloric and experimental techniques. Judith Doyle and her crew focus on one of the most exciting and important of these theatre groups – Nixtayolero (Dawn Star) and its director, Alan Bolt. The film follows Nixtayolero as they travel to perform in remote, rural areas. Their work, and the response of their audiences, is juxtaposed with film of popular festivals- La Gigantona (the giant women puppets of Leon) and the festival of San Sylvestre in Katarina. Culture in Nicaragua is incredibly mixed: theatre as a weapon in the insurrection, contemporary television, disco in Managua’s “Plastic City.” “Eye of the Mask” gives us a taste of that diversity. We also see a rare view of theatre as used in the very poor and isolated areas of Nicaragua. This is a film that can be used and enjoyed by a wide variety of groups: solidarity groups, film and theatre people, churches – anyone interested in popular art and events in Central America. Featuring dance, festivals, storytelling, popular song and the re-enactments of subversive theatre, before and after the revolution. English and Spanish with English subtitles.
Eye of the Mask
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Through a flood of images and impressions, a narrator attempts to recall a family holiday. Shot in Berlin and Toronto, Bunte Kuh combines a found postcard, a family photo album and original footage to weave together the temporal presence of two separate vacations.
Bunte Kuh
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“[T] is a film at the limit of cinema, an experiment in the moving image where stillness and movement converge on each other to produce an experience of time as space. Philippe Leonard shot the footage for this remarkable work at Times Square, in New York City, during the hours of artificial illumination. Partly for this reason, it is an oneiric diary, tempted by myth and, at the same time, suffused by a melancholy sense that myth has lost its magical power. Faces appear and disappear in spasmodic waves of light, which emanate from billboards and mobile telephone screens and confuse the boundary between the organic and the artificial. The dilation of time and the miniaturization that that enables in [T] also ensures that the momentary betrayal of excitement, suspicion, attraction, hesitation, boredom and relief that traverses these faces approaches pure physicality. A smile, a blank stare, a fluttering eyelash: what the film permits us to encounter in these isolated elements is a materiality drained of eroticism, a society of bodies beneath the neon signs, where the market has abducted everything and everyone. The meticulously edited image track is brilliantly echoed in a sound track that renders the underground subway as a haunting residue and subtext. Times Square is a stop on the subway line; [T] is a film that arrests the mania of that space, giving to the viewer a rare experience of visual redemption.” – Rosalind Morris
[T]
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A diptych filmed on a journey between Montreal and New York City. My last roll of Ektachrome to commemorate an important day when two became unified in the act of giving.
Roundtrip
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Norma and Virginia lived together in Chicago for almost fifty years. They died isolated, the vibrant lesbian community of their youth long gone; their tiny Chicago bungalow stuffed with objects – matchbook covers of bars where they had danced, paint-by-numbers left half done, bowling shirts Norma wore winning her many trophies, and over two thousand snapshots of lesbian life spanning four decades. An experimental documentary, Leftovers uses Norma and Virginia’s snapshots and objects to explore the unforeseen trajectory of lives lived at the margins. The film is a love story that poses a number of questions. How do we use objects, especially personal photos, to construct identity? How do the meanings of these objects change over time, even after death? And how did two women who lived a life so fully in community end their lives in such a dark closet?
Leftovers
![[T]](https://i.vimeocdn.com/video/543404260-5ff8a93a710d2c58887bc14f81bdbcc847fcade7642f341fa0d2c99023394424-d_100x75?&r=pad®ion=us)
