Project-C: Short Films That Explore Big Ideas

PROJECT-C: SHORT FILMS THAT EXPLORE BIG IDEAS

CURATORIAL ESSAY BY APRIL THOMPSON, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, CINEWORKS:

In the films, The Script, by Conor Provenzano and The Feminine Appetite, by Isaac You, archival footage is used to critique social standards and cultural mythologies such as whiteness and attractiveness. These artists use sound, pacing, and narrative to satirize this footage as anachronistic, while also giving us pause to reflect on how these ideas manifest in our contemporary moment.

In the films Travel Sizes by Xinyue Liu, Once Upon A Time, by Han Pham, and Ice Cream by Sydney Southam, we see personal reflections on embodied memory, collective identity, and how shared images can create longing for place and family. Each of these filmmakers present a unique approach to the boundary between fiction and non-fiction, considering how the two can be merged within the imagery we consume.

In A Meditation on Grain, by David Avelino, and No Monopoly on Bad Judgement by Peter Sickert, the artists use found footage and found audio to play with film’s very materiality. Respectively, they contemplate the poetics of a loop in sound and focus, and the warp of magnetic sound alongside the weave of grainy film stock. In these more abstract ensembles, we are encouraged to think through how the form dictates the message, and what meanings we project onto the medium.
 

Reflecting on the creative process of art making itself arises in Laura Arboleda’s YNMD, and Phoebe Parson’s Underwater. YNMD presents us with a visual poem in analogue found footage, arranged by chance with accompanying audio prompts. Underwater delivers a personal journey into shifting one’s perspective on success and failure, with animated musings on time, process, and creative ideation. Despite their vastly different methods, both these films provide a reprieve from the rational, logical approach to artmaking, and instead celebrate the intuitive and latent, checking ego at the door.

Finally, in SMGAN by Giselle Liu, we glimpse the importance of story and artform in preserving intergenerational Indigenous knowledge. Filmed in Lax Kwa’laams on the unceded territories of Ts’mysen Nation, we follow Indigenous artist, Tina Robinson, as she conducts the first phase of the traditional Indigenous art form of chilkat weaving: the harvest. In this simple experimental documentary, the idea of recycling is taken up with regards to harvesting cedar to sustain culturally significant art practices.

Across this strong selection of films by emerging Canadian filmmakers, viewers are invited to discover both personal and societal reflections on identity, migration, family, and art making, while celebrating the creativity of repurposing and reimaging the materials that exist all around us. 

— April Thompson
Executive Director, Cineworks Independent Filmmakers Society