The Flower of Pain

A cri de coeur against Iraq War I from writer-director John Gianvito (Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind).

A visual essay about the progressive tradition of the United States as seen through grave markers and monuments.

First begun in 2006, WAKE (SUBIC) completes the documentary diptych, FOR EXAMPLE, THE PHILIPPINES, the first part of which, VAPOR TRAIL (CLARK) was released in 2010. Collectively this nine-hour essay explores circumstances of toxic contamination around the former US military bases in the Philippines as the locus for a meditation on historical amnesia, colonial privilege, and the consequences of unchecked militarism. Interweaving both cinéma-vérité and interview footage of Filipino victims and their families, environmental spokespersons, and community activists, along with early photographic material pertaining to the Philippine-American War, partisan songs, historical texts, and landscape photography, both films are an attempt to construct a work capable of rendering some measure of this human and environmental tragedy and the complexities of its remedy.

Taking inspiration from the collaborative 1967 militant anthology film Far from Vietnam, five of the boldest and most prominent American militant filmmakers unite to create this searing (and seething) omnibus work, employing a variety of approaches to reveal the hidden costs of the United States' (and Canada's) most expensive and longest-running war. (TIFF)

An investigation into the ecological disaster caused by a US military base on the Philippines – and its victims, their world. A humble act of solidarity, a defiant work of remembrance, a rallying cry to rise and resist, a cinematic prose poem.

The memory of a particular moment in early 20th century history when, in 1913, Helen Keller (1880-1968), a deaf-blind writer, lecturer and political activist, spoke, for the first time and in public, about socialism and progressive causes.

Five «cinematographic letters» by five filmmakers addressed to individuals with whom it was impossible to correspond in real life. Filmed in a combination of Super-8, video and 16mm in New York, Boston, San Francisco, and Montreal, the five episodes are, Letter to an Unborn Child, Letter to a Romantic Ideal, Letter to an Innocent Victim, Letter to a Suicide, and Letter to the Unknown.

a short meditation on the student residency of Boston’s historic Mission Hill neighborhood.

A man hikes through late-winter woods. Russia invades Ukraine. It’s difficult to reconcile the scales of action described by those sentences, but this difficulty is what John Gianvito dwells on in his new video. It may simply be that this is a diary, movingly plain and provisional in construction, which recounts what its author did for a few months last year: he watched a war on the internet and went outside. Even if that’s true, such a description makes Gianvito’s images seem less strange than they are

Three figures - man, woman, child - roam the grounds of a State Mental Hospital, a kind of hell on earth, looking for each other or for a supreme witness to their loneliness. A visual poem with voices off.

Rotterdam regular John Gianvito (Vapor Trail (Clark), IFFR 2010) checks in with a sensitive, homebound film diary recorded in the pandemic years 2020-2022. The watchful, wary stance of deer outside his house triggers a series of fragments associated with death, burial, mourning and care: Gianvito calls it 'a requiem'. Snatches of classic soundtracks (including Renoir's Partiede campagne, 1936) and glimpses of news broadcasts expand the private, intimate context.

On September 11th, 2001, the security bubble, within which so many Americans live, was violently perforated and, at least for a moment, the air, the heart, the eye was pierced by the rageful acts of the discontented, soon supplanted by the vengeful ax of the U.S. response. This video is an imagistic evocation of the climate (emotional and otherwise) of this time.