As Usual

This experimental short documents the clash, sometimes obsessive, sometimes glorifying, between humans and their mechanized environment. Using photographs, the animator creates varying perspectives through optical manipulation and changing colour, achieving bold and provocative effects.

Warning: This film contains flashing images and stroboscopic sequences

An experimental film from Arthur Lipsett, Free Fall is an assortment of film trimmings assembled to make a wry comment on humankind in today’s world. It evokes a surrealist dream of our fall from grace into banality.

A film of mixed cinematic metaphors made with students from Queen’s University and local neighborhood children - a portrait of a young boy’s journey of self-discovery in a bewildering world of contradictions and imposed conditions. Many of the sequences are surrealistic in effect, creating a social commentary expressed in symbolic language.

Pia Yona Massie's Sayonara Super 8 uses personal archival footage to ask questions about the fragile nature of memory, human relationships and the foibles of the medium itself.

This short black-and-white film shows eerie scenes of a downtown without people. The effect is disturbing. The camera shoots familiar urban scenes, without a soul in sight: streets empty, buildings empty, yet everywhere there is evidence of recent life and activity. At the end of the film we learn what has happened.

This experimental short explores the dual use of film as both mnemonic device and documentary archive. To achieve this, filmmaker Amanda Dawn Christie uses images from home movies that have been damaged, leaving edge code, sprockets, and optical tracks exposed.

Translated from a self-reflexive Chinese saying, Yun Lam Li's I thought of you often, this film is a visual poem about the meaning of aging within a culture that is not one's own.

In this experimental animated short, Ryan Larkin (Walking) creates a series of figures who move across the screen and disappear into a hole. Eventually, the hole metamorphoses into a bridge, on top of which stands the young man from whom the others figures originated.

This short experimental film riffs on the conventions of silent cinema by examining Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times within the context of postmodern culture. It explores an integrated relationship between music and cinematic structure in response to the perceived shortcomings of postmodernism.

In this short, poetic film, a woman, 9 months pregnant, senses the danger the world holds for her unborn child. She wanders the city holding her camera, expressing and transforming this anxiety through photographic images. Combining live-action images with paper cut-outs, this moving film is about the survival of life on earth, and the hopes we cherish for our children. A film without words.

William Commanda, whose Algonquin name is Ojigkwanong, was born on the Maniwaki reserve in Quebec in 1913. The story of his early life is a familiar one: the loss of Indigenous culture, numbing poverty and escape into alcohol. In 1961 Commanda, then chief of his reserve, was terminally ill. He had a vision that would transform his life and those of his people. Imagining a Circle of all Nations, his first gesture was to reconcile the Algonquins and Iroquois. Since then, he has devoted himself to the reconciliation of peoples and cultures. The message of this old sage is universal: healing is the main priority and can only be achieved through forgiveness and tolerance. In this, he shares much with other remarkable individuals who managed to wash politics clean of resentment: Gandhi, Martin Luther King, the Dalai Lama and Nelson Mandela. In French with English subtitles.