Benjamin R. Taylor
Benjamin R. Taylor is an artist, the creative director of VISIONS and co-director of la lumière collective in Montréal. He enjoys sharing cinema that questions where and when images might be situated, that asks who is speaking, for whom and to whom. As creative director of VISIONS, he facilitates in-person screenings of work that straddles documentary and experimental cinema, that oscilates between the real and the dark glass through which we perceive it. As part of la lumière collective, he encourages cinema at a human scale, films and screenings that bear the marks of their makers and invite audiences into an environment that belongs to them. coups de coeur : PAYSAGE SOUS LES PAUPIÈRES 88-88 UN GRAND BRUIT THE PIMP AND HIS TROPHIES IN ORDER NOT TO BE HERE
Related to this actor
Orchard
Much of the footage that comprises _Orchard_ is of a 19th century ruin that included a walled orchard of the southwest of Ireland. It is set deep in the woods and the crumbling brick and mortar of the broken walls have become the anchor for the roots of slender trees, so uninhibited for all this time that they reach 20 feet in height and have thick roots that follow like slow lazy trickles of w...
Coyolxauhqui
Subscription access
_Coyolxauhqui_ recasts the mythical dismemberment of the Aztec Moon goddess Coyolxauhqui by her brother Huitzilopochtli, the deity of war, the Sun and human sacrifice. The film is a poem of perception, one that unveils how contemporary Mexican femicide is linked to a patriarchal history with roots in deeper cultural constructs.
Wayward Fronds
Subscription access
A snake on a bedspread, a mermaid on her throne. This 16 mm documentary poem turns the Florida Everglades into a theatre where nature takes back its rights from a decrepit civilisation.
Non contractuel
They do accounting, handle human-resources matters and run sales for a car dealership. They answer the phone, peck at their keyboards, organize meetings and take lunch breaks. They learn to type faster, speak better, project self-confidence. With their pay, they buy fancy vacations or giant pythons. What’s going on in this (almost) ordinary company? In this drily funny short, Paul Heintz slowly...
Hoarders Without Borders
Featuring crystallized magic markers and the kidney stone of a horse, the generously-curated mineral collection of Mary Johnson comes to life in a manual labor of love for the process of archival procedure.
Ghosts and Gravel Roads
An inventory of lost memories and places, the sun bleached landscape of Saskatchewan serves as a metaphor for displacement, a framing of emptiness and absence. Traveling to forgotten towns and channeled through old family photographs the camera catalogs the haunting remnants of the past, frail monuments and communities laid bare, broken under economic collapse. Under the weight of the prairie s...
The Pimp and His Trophies
Prostitution, pimping and human trafficking are universal phenomena of society and at the same time a taboo in public discourse. Being the granddaughter of one of Salzburg’s most infamous pimps, I have encountered a perpetrator on a truly intimate level. My goal is not to shock, but to show the reality behind the façade, with all of its cracks, to expose the many facets of truth that lie beneath.
In Order Not to Be Here
An uncompromising look at the ways privacy, safety, convenience and surveillance determine our environment. Shot entirely at night, the film confronts the hermetic nature of white-collar communities, dissecting the fear behind contemporary suburban design. By examining evacuated suburban and corporate landscapes, the film reveals a peculiarly 21st century hollowness… an emptiness born of our co...
A Great Noise
Anarchists, utopians, situationists, surrealists, mystical thoughts? Twentieth-century poets, for whom words are both breath and meaning. Sound and sigh, text and texture, page and image. Crossing a century of horror and promise, of barbarity and technology, whose burden discharges heavily onto any future. And very low, in the clamor of time, the poet deals the blows of words that we stubborn...
No Time for Tomorrow
How can someone be part of a filiation in the absence of direct references to its own culture? How to identify with a history, through experiences, memories or images of another. No Time for Tomorrow addresses these issues through the notions of otherness, disappearance and memory in interaction with history - both intimate and collective - and their possible projection into both documentary ...
Toré
There is what I see, what is shown to me, what I can’t see, what I don’t see… I was invited to film a ritual. One that can be shown to foreigners, to “dried-heads” like me. A child of the village watches Disney’s Fantasia on TV. He is interrupted. What the child lives when he dances? What am I able to see from what is shown to me? Shot in the Xucuru–Kariri tribe, in Alagoas, Brazil.
Quiet Zone
Combining elements of documentary, film essay and experimental film, filmmakers Karl Lemieux and David Bryant take us deep into the world of those who suffer from electromagnetic hypersensitivity. Stubbornly defying traditional genres, Quiet Zone weaves together an unusual story in which sound and image distort reality to make the distress of these “wave refugees” palpable.
Baba Dana Talks to the Wolves
An impressionistic portrait of Baba Dana, an 85 year-old Bulgarian woman who has chosen to spend her life in the mountain, away from people and cities. Working with a 16mm film camera, expired film stock, hand-processing techniques and no commentary nor dialogue, I seek to create a visceral cinematic language that reflects her unique ways of living and being.
El Mar La Mar
Un soleil de plomb s’abat sur tous ceux qui traversent le désert du Sonora entre le Mexique et les États-Unis : les quelques personnes qui y vivent et les immigrants sans-papiers les plus démunis qui essaient de passer la frontière. Leurs traces et leurs dépouilles s’accumulent, s’estompent, se décomposent et s’inscrivent dans la topographie du paysage. Ce qui est absent devient présent, de mêm...
Trigger Warning
Un regard sur de simples objets ménagers provenant d’une liste publiée dans le *Harper’s Magazine* de décembre 2016, filmés avec une caméra en forme de pistolet.
The State of the World
Ron récite un poème de Baudelaire tiré d’un recueil trouvé dans la rue. Ti-Red, sortant de prison, sillonne le quartier à la recherche de sa copine autochtone. Marco et Rob, bien allumés avec du crack, doivent trouver une manière rapide de gagner de l’argent. Daguy, un artiste sans-abri qui campe à Occupons Montréal, cherche un endroit où dormir au chaud. Pendant ce temps, une manifestation spo...
88:88
Méditation personnelle sur la famille, l'amitié, la pauvreté et le cinéma, le film s'inspire du théoricien et activiste politique français Alain Badiou. Medina documente la vie de ses amis vivant dans un quartier à faible revenu de Winnipeg, entremêlant techniques d'avant-garde, expérimentations visuelles et sonores et moments d'émotivités brutes. 88:88, --:--. C'est ce qui apparaît sur les ...
Landscape in the Mind's Eye
À travers des yeux d’enfants et ceux de femmes de générations différentes, ce film nous révèle l’âme d’un petit village de la Haute-Côte-Nord. Madame Kennedy entretient avec la forêt un lien vital ; Diane, devant le trajet difficile de sa vie, relève la tête ; Cathy, à 18 ans, possède la lucidité mordante de celles qui ont eu à se battre. La force et la volonté de chacune se rejoignent chez Guy...
Orchard
Much of the footage that comprises _Orchard_ is of a 19th century ruin that included a walled orchard of the southwest of Ireland. It is set deep in the woods and the crumbling brick and mortar of the broken walls have become the anchor for the roots of slender trees, so uninhibited for all this time that they reach 20 feet in height and have thick roots that follow like slow lazy trickles of w...
Coyolxauhqui
Subscription access
_Coyolxauhqui_ recasts the mythical dismemberment of the Aztec Moon goddess Coyolxauhqui by her brother Huitzilopochtli, the deity of war, the Sun and human sacrifice. The film is a poem of perception, one that unveils how contemporary Mexican femicide is linked to a patriarchal history with roots in deeper cultural constructs.
Wayward Fronds
Subscription access
A snake on a bedspread, a mermaid on her throne. This 16 mm documentary poem turns the Florida Everglades into a theatre where nature takes back its rights from a decrepit civilisation.
Non contractuel
They do accounting, handle human-resources matters and run sales for a car dealership. They answer the phone, peck at their keyboards, organize meetings and take lunch breaks. They learn to type faster, speak better, project self-confidence. With their pay, they buy fancy vacations or giant pythons. What’s going on in this (almost) ordinary company? In this drily funny short, Paul Heintz slowly...
Hoarders Without Borders
Featuring crystallized magic markers and the kidney stone of a horse, the generously-curated mineral collection of Mary Johnson comes to life in a manual labor of love for the process of archival procedure.
Ghosts and Gravel Roads
An inventory of lost memories and places, the sun bleached landscape of Saskatchewan serves as a metaphor for displacement, a framing of emptiness and absence. Traveling to forgotten towns and channeled through old family photographs the camera catalogs the haunting remnants of the past, frail monuments and communities laid bare, broken under economic collapse. Under the weight of the prairie s...
The Pimp and His Trophies
Prostitution, pimping and human trafficking are universal phenomena of society and at the same time a taboo in public discourse. Being the granddaughter of one of Salzburg’s most infamous pimps, I have encountered a perpetrator on a truly intimate level. My goal is not to shock, but to show the reality behind the façade, with all of its cracks, to expose the many facets of truth that lie beneath.
In Order Not to Be Here
An uncompromising look at the ways privacy, safety, convenience and surveillance determine our environment. Shot entirely at night, the film confronts the hermetic nature of white-collar communities, dissecting the fear behind contemporary suburban design. By examining evacuated suburban and corporate landscapes, the film reveals a peculiarly 21st century hollowness… an emptiness born of our co...
A Great Noise
Anarchists, utopians, situationists, surrealists, mystical thoughts? Twentieth-century poets, for whom words are both breath and meaning. Sound and sigh, text and texture, page and image. Crossing a century of horror and promise, of barbarity and technology, whose burden discharges heavily onto any future. And very low, in the clamor of time, the poet deals the blows of words that we stubborn...
No Time for Tomorrow
How can someone be part of a filiation in the absence of direct references to its own culture? How to identify with a history, through experiences, memories or images of another. No Time for Tomorrow addresses these issues through the notions of otherness, disappearance and memory in interaction with history - both intimate and collective - and their possible projection into both documentary ...
Toré
There is what I see, what is shown to me, what I can’t see, what I don’t see… I was invited to film a ritual. One that can be shown to foreigners, to “dried-heads” like me. A child of the village watches Disney’s Fantasia on TV. He is interrupted. What the child lives when he dances? What am I able to see from what is shown to me? Shot in the Xucuru–Kariri tribe, in Alagoas, Brazil.
Quiet Zone
Combining elements of documentary, film essay and experimental film, filmmakers Karl Lemieux and David Bryant take us deep into the world of those who suffer from electromagnetic hypersensitivity. Stubbornly defying traditional genres, Quiet Zone weaves together an unusual story in which sound and image distort reality to make the distress of these “wave refugees” palpable.
Baba Dana Talks to the Wolves
An impressionistic portrait of Baba Dana, an 85 year-old Bulgarian woman who has chosen to spend her life in the mountain, away from people and cities. Working with a 16mm film camera, expired film stock, hand-processing techniques and no commentary nor dialogue, I seek to create a visceral cinematic language that reflects her unique ways of living and being.
El Mar La Mar
Un soleil de plomb s’abat sur tous ceux qui traversent le désert du Sonora entre le Mexique et les États-Unis : les quelques personnes qui y vivent et les immigrants sans-papiers les plus démunis qui essaient de passer la frontière. Leurs traces et leurs dépouilles s’accumulent, s’estompent, se décomposent et s’inscrivent dans la topographie du paysage. Ce qui est absent devient présent, de mêm...
Trigger Warning
Un regard sur de simples objets ménagers provenant d’une liste publiée dans le *Harper’s Magazine* de décembre 2016, filmés avec une caméra en forme de pistolet.
The State of the World
Ron récite un poème de Baudelaire tiré d’un recueil trouvé dans la rue. Ti-Red, sortant de prison, sillonne le quartier à la recherche de sa copine autochtone. Marco et Rob, bien allumés avec du crack, doivent trouver une manière rapide de gagner de l’argent. Daguy, un artiste sans-abri qui campe à Occupons Montréal, cherche un endroit où dormir au chaud. Pendant ce temps, une manifestation spo...
88:88
Méditation personnelle sur la famille, l'amitié, la pauvreté et le cinéma, le film s'inspire du théoricien et activiste politique français Alain Badiou. Medina documente la vie de ses amis vivant dans un quartier à faible revenu de Winnipeg, entremêlant techniques d'avant-garde, expérimentations visuelles et sonores et moments d'émotivités brutes. 88:88, --:--. C'est ce qui apparaît sur les ...
Landscape in the Mind's Eye
À travers des yeux d’enfants et ceux de femmes de générations différentes, ce film nous révèle l’âme d’un petit village de la Haute-Côte-Nord. Madame Kennedy entretient avec la forêt un lien vital ; Diane, devant le trajet difficile de sa vie, relève la tête ; Cathy, à 18 ans, possède la lucidité mordante de celles qui ont eu à se battre. La force et la volonté de chacune se rejoignent chez Guy...
