Gravity and Grace

Found memories decayed by the shock patterns of childhood trauma. This films is made mostly with footage found in the bin of an ophanage. The white progressivelly disolve within a darknest more and more dense. Faces progressivelly disolves within one another.

A survivor of the Holocaust and an impoverished aboriginal boy have just died. United in their displacement, they become caught up in the flux of transmigration. A nomadic fugue, they wander timelessly among the naked souls of Winnipeg's desolate North End.

The everyday life of a couple at the twilight of their lives.

Polish land taking in the Jewish dead. Beneath the streets of Warsaw, under the garden of the Embassy of the People’s Republic of China, are the lost writings of The Ash Kodesh (the holy fire), Rabbi Klonimus Kalmish Szapiro, a Chassidic master who was imprisoned in the Warsaw Ghetto. His lost aphorisms float through the hallowed trees and shadow architectures that sheltered jewish fugitives during the Shoah. In the forests, unmarked graves await commemoration; through glitch and balagan we are pulled into subterranean landscapes that emerge as fragmented archives of silence.

Drawing on issues of memory, decay, palimpsest and the rubbing together of archive, fiction and situations, pilgrimage was constructed from found strips of 8mm amateur footage gleaned during a residency in Sydney, Australia. The original footage—a tourist’s voyeuristic, filmed impressions of a pilgrimage in a crowded urban space, where the faithful painfully stumble before the entrance of a temple—was reworked using an optical printer and other hand-made techniques.

The explosive story of how a stubborn band of independent filmmakers started a film co-operative that became the most highly respected and mythologized film centre in Canada. Tales outlines the tremendous importance and impact of Winnipeg on the national filmmaking scene. Packed with rare archival footage, dynamic film excerpts, and hilarious interviews, this documentary traces the history of the legendary Winnipeg Film Group. We hear candid behind the scenes stories that illuminate the storied rise of acclaimed filmmakers like John Paizs (Crime Wave), Guy Maddin (Tales From The Gimli Hospital, My Winnipeg) Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan (We’re Talking Vulva, Good Citizen, Betty Baker) and Caroline Monnet (Ikwe). Often mired in controversy, the Film Group has been acclaimed at film festivals around the world – attested to by several Toronto film luminaries in the film – for subversive, original filmmaking. This documentary continues that tradition of bold, exuberant work.

Silent 16mm loop made for the situated cinema project at ArtSpace in Sydney, Australia. Composed of old footage from the directors' families.

"Like a world seen in sleep - a paradox of wakefulness and delirium, part lucid dream, part sunshine through sleep-heavy lids - the treated footage in Solomon Nagler's perhaps/We follows a cycle, with motifs of the ever-present twilight in a steel-blue Warsaw set against what could be (but probably isn't) archive footage, of an old woman asleep on a day-bed and an overgrown, forgotten Jewish Cemetery. Found sounds and field recordings join scratched records to create a soundtrack as plaintive as Nagler's manipulated film stock, a lone voice introducing and concluding the film: I float/ Above the world/ In my sleep/ In my dreams / And every time I dream, I loose half my body. A rumination on loss and memory, or memories half-forgotten, whilst perhaps/We isn't figurative, it offers and account of humanity, peopled by ghosts - undoubtedly the ghosts of the Holocaust: mournful yet never peevish, never mawkish." - Adam Pugh, Programmer Aurora Film Festival, Norwich England.

Silent 16mm loop made for the situated cinema project at ArtSpace in Sydney, Australia. Filmed in an unlit abandoned music hall in Sackville, NB.

It's 1903, and Otto Weininger, Vienna's most infamous self-hating Jew has decided to kill himself in a room containing Beethoven's deathbed. He has just published his first book Sex and Character, and has yet to witness an acknowledgment of his self-assured genius. Haunted by the damning statements within his own book, he holds a gun to his head, and takes a leap towards the great unknown.

A short film that weaves together original and archival material to create an ethereal narrative texture, Black Saltwater Elegy intimately links the discordant threads of a popular history of dispossession (Africville) with the solitude of its protagonist's graveyard-shift fantasies. After opening with disquieting archival footage of the demolition of Africville, the film shifts to an austere observational portrait. A palatable sense of the duration of midnight work slowly shifts into subtle gestures that hint towards choreographed events. Eventually, a breech occurs as the protagonist fuses with an emergent dreamscape, where ruined landscapes and a resurrection of an extinct community intertwine. Using the protagonist's disembodied point-of-view, the audience floats above a reconstructed Africville, one forever present, nesting in a bed of saltwater fog.

B&W and Colour/Super-8/16mm

A counter monument for five unmarked mass graves in the forests of eastern Poland. Phytograms gleaned and generated from flora on site - exposed and processed in situ. Research completed in partnership with the Zapomniane Foundation.

An upheaval - stitched and woven into abrupt 16mm light sculptures that reflect on besieged cities as they become ripped apart and reconfigured due to urban gentrification. The film material is sourced from fragments of rubble infrastructure dispersed and strewn about as older buildings are demolished and untold histories become erased. This film is an elegiac experimental map of the text and textures of cities in a state of flux.

B&W/Super-8/16mm

A Visual essay of indexical failures that examine the bliss of ineffable gestures…