Essay
242 products
Bicentenario
Duration: 1h28
Subscription access
Two hundred years after Simón Bolívar's liberation campaign in Colombia, _Bicentenario_ retraces Bolívar's journey across the country, searching for his lingering ghost within the contested territory. Creatively blending oral traditions, landscape cinema, and political essay, _Bicentenario_ cinematically reveals the collision of history and myth etched into the land of what would inevitably bec...
There Will Be No More Night
Duration: 2h32
Subscription access
_There Will Be No More Night_ relies on footage captured by thermal cameras used by the American and French armies in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. By diverting these images from the propaganda narratives in which they are typically embedded, the film examines the dangers of an unchecked desire to see, prompting a reflection on the new paradigms of modern warfare.
Elefsina Notre Amour
Subscription access
"Deserted landscapes, ancient ruins and abandoned shipwrecks at sea. Elefsina’s archeological sites don’t come close to being as hauntingly beautiful as these dead ships. They stand majestically like memorial sculptures and bring a magnetism to the eye. In fact, these are the neglected refugees of Elefsina. For how did they end up there, anyway? What's their story? That's the story I want to kn...
The Last of the Franco-Ontarians
The Last of the Franco-Ontarians
Duration: 1h56Subscription access
The testamentary cry of a minority culture in the face of the hegemonic steamroller, or, doubt is a benevolent devil. In his hometown of Fauquier, Northern Ontario, poet Pierre Albert organizes a grand celebration to mark the foretold demise of the last Franco-Ontarian. A hybrid and eclectic project reflecting its subject, this imaginary documentary is a passionate tribute to a people and their...
Bergen, Norway
Subscription access
"Yesterday, I found my abuser's address in my phone's memory. I don't have a name, I don't have a face, I only have his address." - Alexia Roc
And How Miserable Is the Home of Evil
And How Miserable Is the Home of Evil
Duration: 14 minutesSubscription access
The website of Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, is crammed with filmed sermons and speeches. Appropriating these official archives, Saleh Kashefi – exiled in Switzerland – has created a political fiction that is both hard-hitting and ambiguous.
A Flower in the Mouth
Subscription access
A film in two parts: a first act filmed as an observational documentary in the world's largest flower market, followed by a fictional second act about a man, afflicted by a terminal illness, encountering a stranger in a train station bar. A radical reflection about time running out and what remains to be done, adapted from a play by Pirandello.
Some of My Friends
Subscription access
Seven portraits of people who present themselves at work and in daily life. Seven ways of being present to the world. People who are exceptional because they are like everyone else.
Silence of the Tides
Silence of the Tides is a cinematic portrait of the largest tidal wetlands in the world: the Wadden Sea. The film plays witness to the rough, yet fragile relationship between man and nature as it pulsates with the inhaling and exhaling of the tides. It’s a hypnotizing large screen look into the cycles and contrasts of the seasons: life and death, storm and silence, the masses and the individua...
Night Falls
A historian with the gift of clairvoyance roams the streets of the old City of Lights. In the falls of Shawinigan, he finds a meditation on human history and its loss of meaning.
In the Eyes of a Beast
Filmmaker Dominique Loreau set out to explore the relationships between people and animals sharing the same spaces. In farms, alongside an ethologist in the field, in slaughterhouses, zoos, museums, urban settings, a dance rehearsal room, and even during a performance where an actor transforms into an animal, she captures the gazes of animals observing humans and humans observing animals. She t...
NDDJ (Notre-Dame-du-Jambon)
Karan and Rohan, two biracial brothers raised in an alternative, unique, and marginal environment, creatively find ways to pass the time. Like many kids, a trip to buy candy often feels like the perfect escape from boredom. This short film is an ode to the power of reality and fiction, the love between two brothers, and the beauty of the Quebec countryside.
Magic Mountain
After recovering from tuberculosis, Mariam has a recurring nightmare about being kept high up in the mountains, in the middle of the forest in an old palace where outcasts live. The building is majestic but inhabitants are rejected from society. One day, Mariam goes to meet the secret community to overcome her fear. In becoming friends with the tuberculosis patients of Abastumani and in sharing...
Vampires, It's Nothing to Laugh At
Vampires, It's Nothing to Laugh At
Duration: 1h14In the 1960s, an anthropologist thinks he has discovered the existence of a vampire woman in a Kashub community in Wilno, Ontario. Kinga Michalska returns to the village still recovering from the trauma of this coverage, using a skilful blend of archival footage and performance to question the relationship between lived reality and scientific "truth".
The King is Not My Cousin
In 2017, author Elzéa Foule Aventurin engaged in a series of interviews with her granddaughter. Together, they retrace, not without mischief, a family history sailing from one end of the Black Atlantic to the other. A story of silence, pride and revolt.
I AM A FILM
Shot on location at the Low Four studio in Manchester, this film features poet Stephen Watts reciting his poem _I AM A FILM_, a coda to _The Liberated Film Club_ by Stanley Schtinter. Accompanied by the filmmaker who films him in a way that merges his presence with the recitation, the process unfolds through the use of analog material, close-ups of his face and expressions, and the grain of hi...
To Hell With Culture
Co-founder of the Institute of Contemporary Arts, Herbert Read (1893-1968) was an influential art critic, poet and committed anarchist. In his 1943 essay, _To Hell with Culture_, Read laid out his ideas for a civilisation based on cooperation in which culture would no longer be a commodity, separated from society, but an integral part of everyday life. In this film, director Huw Wahl engages in...
The Seven Last Words
_The Seven Last Words_ sounds out experiential states and rituals particular to humanity, based on the seven themes expressed in a musical composition: forgiveness, salvation, relationship, abandonment, distress, triumph, and reunion. Seven award-winning Canadian filmmakers of diverse origins and art practices explore a wealth of human experience and feeling, based on the seven phrases at the o...
Dear Director
Subscription access
In 1980, American jazz pianist Kazzrie Jaxen watched Ingmar Bergman’s _From the Life of the Marionettes_. Afterwards, she wrote a sixteen-page letter to Bergman, explaining how the film had changed her life. _Dear Director_ is based on this real fan letter, which Swedish director Marcus Lindeen discovered while researching unfinished Bergman scripts for a play.
Bicentenario
Duration: 1h28
Subscription access
Two hundred years after Simón Bolívar's liberation campaign in Colombia, _Bicentenario_ retraces Bolívar's journey across the country, searching for his lingering ghost within the contested territory. Creatively blending oral traditions, landscape cinema, and political essay, _Bicentenario_ cinematically reveals the collision of history and myth etched into the land of what would inevitably bec...
There Will Be No More Night
Duration: 2h32
Subscription access
_There Will Be No More Night_ relies on footage captured by thermal cameras used by the American and French armies in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. By diverting these images from the propaganda narratives in which they are typically embedded, the film examines the dangers of an unchecked desire to see, prompting a reflection on the new paradigms of modern warfare.
Elefsina Notre Amour
Subscription access
"Deserted landscapes, ancient ruins and abandoned shipwrecks at sea. Elefsina’s archeological sites don’t come close to being as hauntingly beautiful as these dead ships. They stand majestically like memorial sculptures and bring a magnetism to the eye. In fact, these are the neglected refugees of Elefsina. For how did they end up there, anyway? What's their story? That's the story I want to kn...
The Last of the Franco-Ontarians
The Last of the Franco-Ontarians
Duration: 1h56Subscription access
The testamentary cry of a minority culture in the face of the hegemonic steamroller, or, doubt is a benevolent devil. In his hometown of Fauquier, Northern Ontario, poet Pierre Albert organizes a grand celebration to mark the foretold demise of the last Franco-Ontarian. A hybrid and eclectic project reflecting its subject, this imaginary documentary is a passionate tribute to a people and their...
Bergen, Norway
Subscription access
"Yesterday, I found my abuser's address in my phone's memory. I don't have a name, I don't have a face, I only have his address." - Alexia Roc
And How Miserable Is the Home of Evil
And How Miserable Is the Home of Evil
Duration: 14 minutesSubscription access
The website of Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, is crammed with filmed sermons and speeches. Appropriating these official archives, Saleh Kashefi – exiled in Switzerland – has created a political fiction that is both hard-hitting and ambiguous.
A Flower in the Mouth
Subscription access
A film in two parts: a first act filmed as an observational documentary in the world's largest flower market, followed by a fictional second act about a man, afflicted by a terminal illness, encountering a stranger in a train station bar. A radical reflection about time running out and what remains to be done, adapted from a play by Pirandello.
Some of My Friends
Subscription access
Seven portraits of people who present themselves at work and in daily life. Seven ways of being present to the world. People who are exceptional because they are like everyone else.
Silence of the Tides
Silence of the Tides is a cinematic portrait of the largest tidal wetlands in the world: the Wadden Sea. The film plays witness to the rough, yet fragile relationship between man and nature as it pulsates with the inhaling and exhaling of the tides. It’s a hypnotizing large screen look into the cycles and contrasts of the seasons: life and death, storm and silence, the masses and the individua...
Night Falls
A historian with the gift of clairvoyance roams the streets of the old City of Lights. In the falls of Shawinigan, he finds a meditation on human history and its loss of meaning.
In the Eyes of a Beast
Filmmaker Dominique Loreau set out to explore the relationships between people and animals sharing the same spaces. In farms, alongside an ethologist in the field, in slaughterhouses, zoos, museums, urban settings, a dance rehearsal room, and even during a performance where an actor transforms into an animal, she captures the gazes of animals observing humans and humans observing animals. She t...
NDDJ (Notre-Dame-du-Jambon)
Karan and Rohan, two biracial brothers raised in an alternative, unique, and marginal environment, creatively find ways to pass the time. Like many kids, a trip to buy candy often feels like the perfect escape from boredom. This short film is an ode to the power of reality and fiction, the love between two brothers, and the beauty of the Quebec countryside.
Magic Mountain
After recovering from tuberculosis, Mariam has a recurring nightmare about being kept high up in the mountains, in the middle of the forest in an old palace where outcasts live. The building is majestic but inhabitants are rejected from society. One day, Mariam goes to meet the secret community to overcome her fear. In becoming friends with the tuberculosis patients of Abastumani and in sharing...
Vampires, It's Nothing to Laugh At
Vampires, It's Nothing to Laugh At
Duration: 1h14In the 1960s, an anthropologist thinks he has discovered the existence of a vampire woman in a Kashub community in Wilno, Ontario. Kinga Michalska returns to the village still recovering from the trauma of this coverage, using a skilful blend of archival footage and performance to question the relationship between lived reality and scientific "truth".
The King is Not My Cousin
In 2017, author Elzéa Foule Aventurin engaged in a series of interviews with her granddaughter. Together, they retrace, not without mischief, a family history sailing from one end of the Black Atlantic to the other. A story of silence, pride and revolt.
I AM A FILM
Shot on location at the Low Four studio in Manchester, this film features poet Stephen Watts reciting his poem _I AM A FILM_, a coda to _The Liberated Film Club_ by Stanley Schtinter. Accompanied by the filmmaker who films him in a way that merges his presence with the recitation, the process unfolds through the use of analog material, close-ups of his face and expressions, and the grain of hi...
To Hell With Culture
Co-founder of the Institute of Contemporary Arts, Herbert Read (1893-1968) was an influential art critic, poet and committed anarchist. In his 1943 essay, _To Hell with Culture_, Read laid out his ideas for a civilisation based on cooperation in which culture would no longer be a commodity, separated from society, but an integral part of everyday life. In this film, director Huw Wahl engages in...
The Seven Last Words
_The Seven Last Words_ sounds out experiential states and rituals particular to humanity, based on the seven themes expressed in a musical composition: forgiveness, salvation, relationship, abandonment, distress, triumph, and reunion. Seven award-winning Canadian filmmakers of diverse origins and art practices explore a wealth of human experience and feeling, based on the seven phrases at the o...
Dear Director
Subscription access
In 1980, American jazz pianist Kazzrie Jaxen watched Ingmar Bergman’s _From the Life of the Marionettes_. Afterwards, she wrote a sixteen-page letter to Bergman, explaining how the film had changed her life. _Dear Director_ is based on this real fan letter, which Swedish director Marcus Lindeen discovered while researching unfinished Bergman scripts for a play.
