By Winds and Tides (2022)

Touch Air

An homage to the influential practice and philosophy of artist Nasreen Mohamedi. The film incorporates Mohamedi’s personal notes and her unique singular vision, drawing upon the aesthetics of the bare line, and its metaphysical journey eliminating physical borders/barriers.

FOREIGN AFFAIRS

Shot on 16mm film in New York and composed in Berlin, the work explores polarizing themes of the metropolis. Audibly and visually, the viewer is put in a flicker between serenity and intensity; harrowing ambience cut with sharp beeps, vulnerable steps mashed in high velocity.

It Fell on Deaf Ears

Because Quebec Sign Language cannot be captured on paper, videography has revealed itself to be the best way to represent this visual language. The first ‘comic strip’ in sign language, the film depicts snatches of conversations between various deaf and hearing protagonists. A visit to a silent world, where the hearing impaired ask us to listen to them.

Woman Is My Last Name

This visual poetry is a celebration of the full spectrum of womanhood, from the complex vulnerability to the hidden power.

reMemBer2.human

In an indeterminate future, forbidden memories challenge a database containing all human memories. An experimental cinematic search between past and future, fiction and fact, Prishtina and Tirana. The future, a glitch.

Angel

In this short film, a young man, a girl and a dog attempt to fly with wings more symbolic than practical.

Bunnyhood

What could possibly be more important than feeding your daughter?

The Long Walk

An animated short based on a scene from "The Long Walk" by Stephen King

Demi-Goddesses

The second essay about still dominant dark aspects of our modern society. It is conceived as a surreal anti-patriarchal thought experiment and raises important questions about gender, power, and social change, prompting us to reflect on how historical patterns of discrimination and oppression might be either repeated or overcome in a reversed gendered world. It challenges the viewer to confront their own assumptions and biases, and to consider the possibilities of a more equitable society.

A Visual Poem

Surreal environments take center stage in this visual odyssey.

Sunstone

Experimental computer animation from pioneering artist Ed Emshwiller.

LAND

LAND is a fluid series of formal land animation experiments based upon the imprint of landscapes in various locations and intuitive interpretations of those movements. Shot in New York, Thimble Islands Bear Island, Connecticut, Armstrong Redwoods, Sonoma County, California, Hastings, England. note* (part of the EYE Filmmuseum Permanent Collection)

A Paw Over Dark

A washed up actor performs night after night in a grimy theater to a nearly empty audience. However, everything changes when a clueless dog jumps on stage.

Trade Tattoo

Trade Tattoo went even further than Rainbow Dance in its manipulation of the Gasparcolor process. The original black and white footage consisted of outtakes from GPO Film Unit documentaries such as Night Mail. Lye transformed this footage in what has been described as the most intricate job of film printing and color grading ever attempted. Animated words and patterns combine with the live-action footage to create images as complex and multi-layered as a Cubist painting. Music was provided by the Cuban Lecuona Band. With its dynamic rhythms, the film seeks (in Lye’s words) to convey “a romanticism about the work of the everyday in all walks of life."

House

An experimental short film.

Stellar

This is a hand-painted film which has been photographically step-printed to achieve various effects of brief fades and fluidity-of-motion, and makes partial use of painted frames in repetition (for "close-up" of textures). The tone of the film is primarily dark blue, and the paint is composed (and rephotographed microscopically) to suggest galactic forms in a space of stars.

Mothlight

Seemingly at random, the wings and other bits of moths and insects move rapidly across the screen. Most are brown or sepia; up close, we can see patterns within wings, similar to the veins in a leaf. Sometimes the images look like paper cutouts, like Matisse. Green objects occasionally appear. Most wings are translucent. The technique makes them appear to be stuck directly to the film.

Eye Myth

After the title, a white screen gives way to a series of frames suggestive of abstract art, usually with one or two colors dominating and rapid change in the images. Two figures emerge from this jungle of color: the first, a shirtless man, appears twice, coming into focus, then disappearing behind the bursts and patterns of color, then reappearing; the second figure appears later, in the right foreground. This figure suggests someone older, someone of substance. The myth? Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2012.

Gemini

Sarah and her two cats go about their separate lives. The cats have strange dreams about their desires, and Sarah develops an unshakable paranoia that something is wrong with them. Sarah's paranoia bleeds into her social life, and her two cats have their dreams come true.

Razors

A man with a razor in his head calls in a maintenance repair.

Graphic Variations on Telidon

"In an effort to explore the flexibility of Telidon, Canada's videotex system, Pierre Moretti, animation artist from the National Film Board, used, in the graphic mode, the geometric figures which form the basis for Telidon's picture description instructions. Thus he created this short animated film."

Devil's Beacon

Martín, a young urban raver, is involved in a strange accident on the road on his way to a party in the middle of the Argentine Pampas. Finding refuge in a mysterious country grocery store and sheltered by two strange locals, Martín's paranoia begins to take over him. As the hours progress, his perception begins to distort, unleashing disturbing visions that will lead him to confront the supernatural forces that hide in the night.

Atman

ĀTMAN is a visual tour-de-force based on the idea of the subject at the centre of the circle created by camera positions (480 such positions). Shooting frame-by-frame the filmmaker set up an increasingly rapid circular motion. ĀTMAN is an early Buddhist deity often connected with destruction; the Japanese aspect is stressed by the devil mask of Hangan, from the Noh, and by using both Noh music and the general principle of acceleration often associated with Noh drama.

removed

Starting with a piece of vintage porn, filmmaker Naomi Uman painstakingly removed each female figure from the footage using nail polish remover, leaving a striking absence where there's usually a fleshy presence. Uman's celebrated film is a smart retort to pornography's obsessive gaze at the female body.

Fuji

A live action footage of a smiling, bespectacled (presumably) Western tourist set against the familiar cadence of an accelerating train revving up as it leaves the station sets the mesmerizing tone for the film's abstract panoramic survey of an Ozu-esque Japanese landscape of electrical power lines, passing trains, railroad tracks, and the gentle slope of obliquely peaked, uniform rooflines as Breer distills the essential geometry of Mount Fuji into a collage of acute angles and converging (and bifurcating) lines .

The Man Who Wrote About His Past

An experimental, non-sensical comedy about bringing a stone age man back to our time, made with the app “Plotagon”.

Adventures of Christopher Bosh in the Multiverse

A true story behind the notorious Miami face-eating cannibal and how the Miami Heat won the NBA title in 2012 despite one of their star players being an interstellar prince who was called away to do battle with evil foes bent on finally making the Internet completely useless.