Warm

A devil makes a violent attempt to change himself into a heavenly creature. His evil process backfires when he is confronted with the creatures from within.

Arising from the earth, a body discovers its nakedness. A suit of armour becomes a metaphor for the trappings of identity. Pixilated to produce the effect of a human marionette, accompanied by a good-natured verse.

Cupid gets beaten at his own game.

In this quintessential 'coming out' film, a grinding rhythm leads us through a passage of closed doors, as a man struggles to break free from his literal and social confinement.

A lonely lighthouse keeper rescues his fantasy: a frostbitten man on the rocks.

"In '(ab)NORMAL' the relationship spectrum, from paranoid avoidance to smothering and overwhelming attention, is traced through four pixilated sketches." - Toronto International Film Festival

The political emotions of the butcher shop are discussed within the codes of Catholicism. Purging Catholic guilt, sins of the flesh, and flesh eating. The confessions of a butcher gone astray. An ambiguous layering of images, one is not sure whether the confessor is human or a pig, or if the priest is a butcher.

"Broken Relationship" moves through a kaleidoscope of colour and pixels to fragments of embraced bodies. Using glitched video footage from classic porn, the broken and distorted imagery speaks to the difficulty that the LBGTQ youth encounter when trying to navigate through their sexuality and relationships. Easy access to pornography means that many young people are learning these important life lessons through a distorted lens. This is especially true of the LGBTQ community where access to information is difficult to acquire from their family, teachers or even friends. The glitched video images mimic the broken messages that much of the porn industry communicates, certainly not the birds and the bee's stories that most youth grow up with.

The curtains are drawn, a clown stands in the spotlight, the reception is dismal. Before s/he can even begin to perform, debilitating fear takes over. Both sad and humorous, this film explores how one can be manipulated by the depths of fear.

When you wake up and you have so much to do that you just want to go back to bed. The illusion created by shooting the entire film in reverse emphasizes the entire cycle of life.

Beware takes sound bites from the 1961 anti-homosexual propaganda film Boys Beware and flips it on its head. The hacked-up narration serves as the voice-over to a barrage of glitched intimacies, making the homosexual monster more fun than frightening.

Animated magazine cutouts of two men having sex lead into appropriated gay porn images, blurred to the point where they become abstract colour and motion. All this is set to pastoral sounds, sex noises, and a reporter's voice-over about the RCMP’s “fruit box” experiments - official and ludicrous attempts to expose closeted gay men.

Homebelly combines waking dreams with unsettling fragments of this and that. An icy soundscape is set to a live-action animated drama featuring a sleeping body and a persistant rock.

Based on real-life experiences, “camp” recounts the stories of homosexual survivors of the WWII concentration camps. A series of short, expressionistic vignettes weave together these horrific experiences. Part documentary, part drama, “camp” uses a variety of mediums to explore the emotional reality of those marked with the pink triangle.

"Hoolboom" is a film that Arts Toronto commissioned local filmmaker Wrik Mead to make based on his impressions of fellow filmmaker Mike Hoolboom. With some collaboration from Mike, Wrik has produced a film about the body, self-awareness, and the art of film.

An experimental film that merges Super 8 and 16mm formats to examine the presence of queer intimacy. At its center are two shirtless men, locked in an embrace, dancing — a quiet yet radical act. Overlaid with hand-inked 16mm film, their bodies become both seen and obscured, highlighted and erased. Through this layered process, Marked reflects on how queer love is shaped, celebrated, and scarred by the society that surrounds it.