Environment
Films to stop and observe, in order to feel the pulse of the world that surrounds us. Life in all its forms; slithering, lurking, swarming, dazzling. Films that remind us that humans are not the centre of it all and that nature will make it its duty to convince those who still doubt it.
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Urban Forests
Duration: 3h10
Subscription access
While green spaces have long been neglected in cities, community-led efforts in recent years have helped restore the many benefits of urban forests. Through a number of innovative nature restoration projects in cities across Canada—from Montreal to Vancouver, via Toronto, Laval, Varennes, and New Westminster—this documentary explores initiatives aimed at bringing nature back into the urban envi...
The Woods Dreams Are Made of
Duration: 2h26
Subscription access
There are days when we’ve had enough of the city, when our eyes can’t stand seeing nothing but buildings, and our ears can no longer bear hearing the sound of engines. So we leave. We move from the sidewalk to the trail, and suddenly we’re in the woods. The hum of the city fades away; we’re in a meadow far, far away. It’s the countryside, the forest, childhood returning. We believe it; we’re th...
Al Basateen (The Orchards)
Duration: 50 minutes
Subscription access
In 2015 in Damascus, the Basateen al-Razi neighborhood was razed to the ground to punish the population for rising up against Bashar al-Assad’s regime. This site is set to make way for Marota City, a project for a modern, connected neighborhood featuring 80 skyscrapers. Having lost everything, two former residents recall their neighborhood, where their homes once stood alongside the city’s olde...
Gan Tang, The Lake
Duration: 28 minutes
Subscription access
"In my hometown of Jiujiang, China, a natural lake and an amusement park share the same name: Gan Tang. The name, meaning “pear trees,” is often associated with a beautiful imagery and comes from the oldest Chinese poem collection, _Book of Odes_. [...] In the summer of 2023, the lake was blocked from the public, drained, and cleansed, followed by the demolition of the Gan Tang Park. The govern...
Colour Poems
Subscription access
"Nine linked short films. Memory, chance observation, and the subsuming of one in the other. [...] A poem started in words is continued by the picture, part of another poem is read for the last of the nine. Some images are formed by direct-on-film animation, others are found by the camera." – Margaret Tait
Aerial
Subscription access
"There’s a general theme of the four elements, earth, air, fire and water – in a different order – air, water, earth, fire and then air again, with all the elements intermingled. But just as a sort of song or even a kind of nursery rhyme. Although I don’t understand musical structure – I can’t really follow the structure of piece of music when I’m listening to it – but I think that film- struct...
Samuel and the Light
Subscription access
Samuel lives in Ponta Negra, a small fishing village on the coast of Paraty, Brazil. Following the boy and his family over the course of six years, the film gradually reveals a more complex reality and its inherent contradictions. The arrival of electricity and tourism crystallizes the dismantling of an idealized paradise, painting a nuanced portrait of contemporary Brazil.
Goodnight Goodnight
Subscription access
With overconsumption of electric light, the resulting light pollution, and the subsequent loss of the night sky, we have effectively rid our lives of context. By suppressing natural temporalities and obscuring our place within the solar system, we are left with a distorted sense of permanence—the permanence of our structures, institutions, and relationships. _Goodnight Goodnight_ is a mid-lengt...
Testerep
Subscription access
A team of scientists explores the vanished island of Testerep along the Belgian coast. Traditional excavations are combined with advanced technologies, such as computer simulations and sound wave analyses, to trace the coastal evolution over 5,000 years. As researchers decode the mysteries, they contemplate the symbiotic relationship between humans, technology, and our temporal landscape, offer...
Everything Everywhere Again Alive
Everything Everywhere Again Alive
Duration: 1h12Subscription access
In the early 1970s, Keith Lock moved to the hippie community of Buck Lake, north of Kingston, Ontario. He went there to join members of Toronto’s underground scene, capturing the daily life of a horizontal, ideal society, free from urban oppression. The result is one of the masterpieces of Canadian experimental cinema, but above all a free-spirited film that challenges the very idea of freedom.
Eastern Anthems
An unfinished film is passed along from one friend to another. The dialogue between them is a journey crossed by the swarming of the Great Eastern Brood X (periodical cicadas that prophetically emerge every 17 years in the United States), invoking a reflection of a post-pandemic present and our shared futures. A road movie composed of a chorus of voices (both human and non-human), the warnings ...
Pioneer Species
Subscription access
In a community garden in Nanterre, inhabitants gather weekly around a pioneer tree species (empress tree, _pawlawnia tomentosa_) that will one day be planted in the future metro stations of the Grand Paris. Through these gatherings, they learn how plants respond to soil, water and urban conditions, while collectively imagining what their neighborhood could become. The film finds its counterpoin...
Before Their Eyes
A couple moves into a tower on an island and spends each day observing the small creatures living on the foreshore and in the grass. By reversing scales and perspectives the film establishes a strange relationship between the observers and the observed. While small living beings try to express their fragility in the face of intrusive exploration, what anxieties do humans experience?
Animus femina
Subscription access
Four women in close contact with wildlife explore our relationship with living beings through repair, reflection, art and "living-with". Four exceptional journeys that invite us to decenter our human gaze and rethink our ways of inhabiting the world in a time of climate crisis.
Life Through The Lens
Subscription access
_Life Through The Lens_ invites us to meet some of passionate individuals of biodiversity in France who contributed to Yann Arthus-Bertrand’s film _Vibrant_ in 2023. Whether professional or amateur naturalists, budding or seasoned videographers, they share with us their life experiences and the little secrets that have enabled them to become intimate witnesses to a natural world as beautiful as...
Untitled (The Things Around Us)
Untitled (The Things Around Us)
Duration: 1h00The video assembly _Untitled (The Things Around Us)_ presents a heterogeneous scenario of constituent elements—environments, conditions, objects, and figures—that play a distinct role in the conceptual processes and design methods of the Brussels-based architecture and urbanism agency 51N4E and the research agency Rural Urban Framework (RUF). Formulated as a catalogue of “things,” in the philos...
Manicouagan
A driven but intimate work, this film recounts the history of Manicouagan (North Shore, Quebec) a legendary territory shaped by the impact of an asteroid 215 million years ago. From the St. Lawrence River to north of the 51st parallel, the legendary Route 389 brings us to the heart of this meteor crater to meet some extraordinary individuals (astrophysicists, geologists, truck-stop manager, hik...
Living Here
_Living Here_ is a story made of solitude and wind, told with the poetry of Nunavik's stark tundra and the beauty of young Martha's words.
Where the Grass is greener
This trip on the edge of surrealism transports the audience through the various corners of the suburbs in order to find where the grass is greener. An unsettling exploration of a seemingly peaceful place that takes a look beyond the white picket fence.
The Act of Beauty
Nestled at the heart of the Bic mountains, in this territory called Lower St. Lawrence, hides a community of wise and audacious people taking root. The collective farm Sageterre is the work of Jean Bédard, writer, philosopher but most importantly, a peasant. His writing calls for action. His work on the land cultivates ideas. Jean Bédard fights to see a new, more humane world, rise.
Urban Forests
Duration: 3h10
Subscription access
While green spaces have long been neglected in cities, community-led efforts in recent years have helped restore the many benefits of urban forests. Through a number of innovative nature restoration projects in cities across Canada—from Montreal to Vancouver, via Toronto, Laval, Varennes, and New Westminster—this documentary explores initiatives aimed at bringing nature back into the urban envi...
The Woods Dreams Are Made of
Duration: 2h26
Subscription access
There are days when we’ve had enough of the city, when our eyes can’t stand seeing nothing but buildings, and our ears can no longer bear hearing the sound of engines. So we leave. We move from the sidewalk to the trail, and suddenly we’re in the woods. The hum of the city fades away; we’re in a meadow far, far away. It’s the countryside, the forest, childhood returning. We believe it; we’re th...
Al Basateen (The Orchards)
Duration: 50 minutes
Subscription access
In 2015 in Damascus, the Basateen al-Razi neighborhood was razed to the ground to punish the population for rising up against Bashar al-Assad’s regime. This site is set to make way for Marota City, a project for a modern, connected neighborhood featuring 80 skyscrapers. Having lost everything, two former residents recall their neighborhood, where their homes once stood alongside the city’s olde...
Gan Tang, The Lake
Duration: 28 minutes
Subscription access
"In my hometown of Jiujiang, China, a natural lake and an amusement park share the same name: Gan Tang. The name, meaning “pear trees,” is often associated with a beautiful imagery and comes from the oldest Chinese poem collection, _Book of Odes_. [...] In the summer of 2023, the lake was blocked from the public, drained, and cleansed, followed by the demolition of the Gan Tang Park. The govern...
Colour Poems
Subscription access
"Nine linked short films. Memory, chance observation, and the subsuming of one in the other. [...] A poem started in words is continued by the picture, part of another poem is read for the last of the nine. Some images are formed by direct-on-film animation, others are found by the camera." – Margaret Tait
Aerial
Subscription access
"There’s a general theme of the four elements, earth, air, fire and water – in a different order – air, water, earth, fire and then air again, with all the elements intermingled. But just as a sort of song or even a kind of nursery rhyme. Although I don’t understand musical structure – I can’t really follow the structure of piece of music when I’m listening to it – but I think that film- struct...
Samuel and the Light
Subscription access
Samuel lives in Ponta Negra, a small fishing village on the coast of Paraty, Brazil. Following the boy and his family over the course of six years, the film gradually reveals a more complex reality and its inherent contradictions. The arrival of electricity and tourism crystallizes the dismantling of an idealized paradise, painting a nuanced portrait of contemporary Brazil.
Goodnight Goodnight
Subscription access
With overconsumption of electric light, the resulting light pollution, and the subsequent loss of the night sky, we have effectively rid our lives of context. By suppressing natural temporalities and obscuring our place within the solar system, we are left with a distorted sense of permanence—the permanence of our structures, institutions, and relationships. _Goodnight Goodnight_ is a mid-lengt...
Testerep
Subscription access
A team of scientists explores the vanished island of Testerep along the Belgian coast. Traditional excavations are combined with advanced technologies, such as computer simulations and sound wave analyses, to trace the coastal evolution over 5,000 years. As researchers decode the mysteries, they contemplate the symbiotic relationship between humans, technology, and our temporal landscape, offer...
Everything Everywhere Again Alive
Everything Everywhere Again Alive
Duration: 1h12Subscription access
In the early 1970s, Keith Lock moved to the hippie community of Buck Lake, north of Kingston, Ontario. He went there to join members of Toronto’s underground scene, capturing the daily life of a horizontal, ideal society, free from urban oppression. The result is one of the masterpieces of Canadian experimental cinema, but above all a free-spirited film that challenges the very idea of freedom.
Eastern Anthems
An unfinished film is passed along from one friend to another. The dialogue between them is a journey crossed by the swarming of the Great Eastern Brood X (periodical cicadas that prophetically emerge every 17 years in the United States), invoking a reflection of a post-pandemic present and our shared futures. A road movie composed of a chorus of voices (both human and non-human), the warnings ...
Pioneer Species
Subscription access
In a community garden in Nanterre, inhabitants gather weekly around a pioneer tree species (empress tree, _pawlawnia tomentosa_) that will one day be planted in the future metro stations of the Grand Paris. Through these gatherings, they learn how plants respond to soil, water and urban conditions, while collectively imagining what their neighborhood could become. The film finds its counterpoin...
Before Their Eyes
A couple moves into a tower on an island and spends each day observing the small creatures living on the foreshore and in the grass. By reversing scales and perspectives the film establishes a strange relationship between the observers and the observed. While small living beings try to express their fragility in the face of intrusive exploration, what anxieties do humans experience?
Animus femina
Subscription access
Four women in close contact with wildlife explore our relationship with living beings through repair, reflection, art and "living-with". Four exceptional journeys that invite us to decenter our human gaze and rethink our ways of inhabiting the world in a time of climate crisis.
Life Through The Lens
Subscription access
_Life Through The Lens_ invites us to meet some of passionate individuals of biodiversity in France who contributed to Yann Arthus-Bertrand’s film _Vibrant_ in 2023. Whether professional or amateur naturalists, budding or seasoned videographers, they share with us their life experiences and the little secrets that have enabled them to become intimate witnesses to a natural world as beautiful as...
Untitled (The Things Around Us)
Untitled (The Things Around Us)
Duration: 1h00The video assembly _Untitled (The Things Around Us)_ presents a heterogeneous scenario of constituent elements—environments, conditions, objects, and figures—that play a distinct role in the conceptual processes and design methods of the Brussels-based architecture and urbanism agency 51N4E and the research agency Rural Urban Framework (RUF). Formulated as a catalogue of “things,” in the philos...
Manicouagan
A driven but intimate work, this film recounts the history of Manicouagan (North Shore, Quebec) a legendary territory shaped by the impact of an asteroid 215 million years ago. From the St. Lawrence River to north of the 51st parallel, the legendary Route 389 brings us to the heart of this meteor crater to meet some extraordinary individuals (astrophysicists, geologists, truck-stop manager, hik...
Living Here
_Living Here_ is a story made of solitude and wind, told with the poetry of Nunavik's stark tundra and the beauty of young Martha's words.
Where the Grass is greener
This trip on the edge of surrealism transports the audience through the various corners of the suburbs in order to find where the grass is greener. An unsettling exploration of a seemingly peaceful place that takes a look beyond the white picket fence.
The Act of Beauty
Nestled at the heart of the Bic mountains, in this territory called Lower St. Lawrence, hides a community of wise and audacious people taking root. The collective farm Sageterre is the work of Jean Bédard, writer, philosopher but most importantly, a peasant. His writing calls for action. His work on the land cultivates ideas. Jean Bédard fights to see a new, more humane world, rise.
