A Grief Observed

Commissioned self-portrait of the artist as metaphysical remix of Abbas Kiarostami's "Close-Up" recorded on a cellphone.

Originally released in 2006, Kubasa in a Glass presents a digitally warped reflection of Winnipeg’s brief and disposable self-image, as seen through local no-budget and public access television of the 1980s.

Bridgeport, January 17, 2008. A teenage girl is found hanged in her room. While everything points to suicide, the autopsy report reveals something else. Ten years later, the director and cousin of the teenager examine the past causes and future consequences of this unsolved crime. Like an imagined biography, the film will explore the relationship between the security of the living space and the violence that can jeopardize it.

On a secluded prairie farm, adolescent boys labor in wheat fields for a sexually predatory warden and his farmhands, who threaten to feed them to a voracious beast if they ever disobey. The newly arrived Linus instantly catches the warden's eye, and begins to receive secret visitations from a mysterious girl. The other boys tell Linus the legend of a special boy who fled the farm and became a glorious angel that will one day return to free them all. When Linus asks the girl if she is the angel, her answer is enigmatic. After the warden's favorite boy dies, Linus is poised to become the next victim. The girl reappears and promises to help him escape, but with hope comes punishment.

Winter. Somewhere between Tehran and Winnipeg. Negin and Nazgol find a sum of money frozen deep within the sidewalk ice and try to find a way to get it out. Massoud leads a group of befuddled tourists upon an increasingly-strange walking tour of Winnipeg historic sites. Matthew leaves his job at the Québec government and embarks upon a mysterious journey to visit his estranged mother.

1987: While the other students wonder if new kid Robin is a boy or a girl, Robin forges a complicated bond with the school bully, making increasingly dangerous choices to fit in.

A family of six's fresh start on 1990s Vancouver Island unravels as their youngest child, Sasha, witnesses the increasingly dangerous behavior of her older brother, Jeremy.

Toronto, Canada, 1899. William Lyon Mackenzie King (1874-1950) fervently believes that he is destined to become Prime Minister, but to do so he will first have to fight his personal obsessions and overcome the many obstacles he will encounter on his tortuous path to power.

A completely hand-made historical micro-epic about the final minutes in the life of Winnipeg's doomed Second World War hero, Andrew Mynarski (1916-1944). Combining wartime aviation melodrama with classical and avant-garde animation techniques (including stop-motion, silhouettes, bleaching, scratching, hand-painting and rubbing letratone patterns directly on the celluloid) Mynarski Death Plummet is a psychedelic photo-chemical war picture on the theme of self-sacrifice, immortality and jellyfish.

In space, a charming little planet named Pluto dreams of joining the Solar System’s official dance troupe. With the help of her asteroid friend, Ceres, and her human discoverer, Clyde William Tombaugh, she will do everything she can to make it happen. In this children’s film, where humans and planets share the spotlight, viewers will accompany Pluto on her quest for fame, until the moment she must face her destiny.

New York, 1905. Visionary inventor Nikola Tesla makes one last appeal to J.P. Morgan, his onetime benefactor.

Set on carrying out her task with dedication, a woman is obsessed with watching over anonymous interiors and occupying them. Both a custodian of the premises and a ghostly presence, she becomes an echo of how we relate to time, solitude and the melancholy of forsaken spaces.

A young quebecer descends into alienation and depression.

Via archival footage and a vintage yet unserious style, this is the hot-shot, right-wing, weird and wild story of Canada's Progressive Conservatives, told through the journey of 18th Prime Minister Brian Mulroney's career as a Tory hopeful to the day of his inauguration.

December 31, 1999. Quebec is a few hours from year 2000 and its potential bug. Trapped in a Montreal appartement, Momo needs only one thing to survive this nightmare: couscous.

The camera’s roving eye seems to warp and bend a mysterious white room in this unsettling excerpt from a film Guy Maddin created for the opening of the Toronto International Film Festival’s Bell Lightbox building.