Film Farm. Wealth is in the Act of Giving

Wealth is in the Act of Giving is an essential introduction to the poetics and politics of Canadian experimental cinema, for the first time in Lithuania. The program emerged from my collaboration with the Independent Imaging Collective “Film Farm,” whose Ontario-based residencies have helped sustain a spirit of discovery and risk in contemporary experimental filmmaking in Canada and beyond. The program reflects a wide range of artistic and social concerns, relying on hand-processing and low-fi experimentation. Filmmakers tackle questions of ecology from traditional and novel perspectives, beginning with auto-ethnography and surrealism in the early works, moving towards direct contact and a phenomenological approach, concluding with indigenous storying through place-thought.

Curated for Vilnius Documentary Film Festival by Philip Hoffman in conversation with the Film Farm Collective and Miklós (Miki) Ambrózy

Across

Across is shaped through unity; the film is about crossing a bridge. The central tension is built upon a desire to connect with an image from the filmmaker’s past. The metaphoric journey forward to see the past is conveyed through a hand-held camera travelling at a great speed across a dirt road, through fields, along fences and through woods. Different color stocks combine with high contrast black and white images of the bridge while on the soundtrack we hear a river. An intensity and anticipation is created in the movement and in the juxtaposition of the different elements.

Minus

“Minus” is a hand-processed, stream of overlapping movements, created on the last evening of Chris Chong’s stay at the workshop. The film was shot on one roll of 16mm 7378 hicon film, using the superimposition capabilities of the bolex camera, without any editing.  “After subtracting most of what took place before the camera, what is left is remnants of light and rhythm, traces of a body in motion. This was Chong’s first 16mm film, and demonstrates the kinds of rich results that can be obtained from simple, highly restricted means and techniques.”

Scratch

Deirdre Logue’s short and deceptively simple film, Scratch  conveys the filmmaker’s physical insertion into nature only this time the experience is not sensual release, rather it is a sadomasochistic and painful journey.  We read “My path is deliberately difficult”. Facing the camera, she puts thistles down her underpants, and pulls them out again. The sounds of breaking glass as well as the crackle of film splices are almost the only sounds heard in this mostly silent film. Intercut are found footage images from an instructional film, we see a bed being automatically made and unmade, glass breaking and plates smashed. This film is sharp and painful. Her body is treated like a piece of emulsion–processed, manipulated, scratched, cut to fit.

We Are Going Home

We Are Going Home is a gorgeous surrealistic film that has all of the characteristics of the trance film and more. It is structured around a dream sequence that has no real beginning or end. The film is in no doubt a nod to the Surrealists as these highly processed landscapes belong to the unconscious.

Emulsion Making Workshop with Kevin Rice (sketch) 

Day to day Film Farm activities including phytogram-making, are documented on film with the help of potassium bromide, silver nitrate, generic food gelatine and distilled water.

Something to Treasure 

A playful and inventive animation film that utilizes botanical hand-processing techniques in conjunction with found footage, to explore consumer desires and nightmares.

The Opposite of Ignoring Chickens 

Working with multiple screens and a polyphonic soundtrack, this film documents the artist tending to and interacting with her seven chickens. The fascinating symmetry between the artist and the chickens reveals a relational co-dependence that collapses the sensual and the intuitive, wildness and domestication. Film elements were processed with native plants sourced from their outdoor chicken coop and in ripe chicken bedding.

Weeping Willow

A handmade short documentary film about a unique weeping willow tree and the metaphors willows hold as sites of good luck, grief and mourning. The 16mm film was hand processed using willow leaves and branches as developing material at the Film Farm / Independent Imaging Retreat, home to this majestic tree in Mount Forest, Ontario, Canada.

Horses in the Year of the Dog 

An immediate love forms between new friends considering motherhood under the roof of a fierce matriarch. Bodies become porous, and passage, bees pollinate the food we consume, becoming and belonging one to the other. Film developed in lavender, eucalyptus, and hibiscus grown on site.

Plume 

Fingers pluck fallen evidence of flight; placed and traced to make avian light. The images in Plume are made up of frame imprints of feathers that had been soaked in a plant-based developer solution, and reanimated using optical printing and digital editing techniques.

DEEP 1

In Deep 1 winged and four legged animals, both wild and domestic, traverse the frame marked by a hand-made practice. Processed and decayed with hyacinth & lichen extract, “the film is built on a sustainable practice: images and the imaging making process evolve out of “a complex material engagement with an ecosystem that draws out the expressive possibilities of living things beyond conventional forms of representation”.

It Matters What 

Absences and translations motivate this experimental animation in an exploration of the methods and materials of reproduction and inscription. The inquiry is set within a framework elucidated through theorist Donna Haraway, taken from her essay Tentacular Thinking: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene.  Enigmatic found-footage calls into question human violence over animal species. Plant life is both the subject matter of the images and assists the means of photographic reproduction. The techniques used include in-camera animation, contact-prints and phytograms created by the exposure of 16mm film overlaid with plant material and dried for hours in direct sunlight.

Arduous Journeys

A filmmakers struggle to resolve their dual heritage.

Thunder Rolling Home 

This is a film about my father’s time spent in the Native Residential School system and the courage it took to reclaim his heritage. He tells the story through a poem, Picking Up The Pieces, written by myself Sharon Isaac. The film chronicles the journey through a series of black and white pictures taped on 16 mm film. The viewer then is taken to present day and comes full circle and showing a brighter future with the reclaiming of our culture, pride in our hair through braids, dancers, grandmother’s love, and language revitalization.

Everything is Right Here

Kahgee from Saugeen First Nation territory, develops her film with dandelions (a colonial plant) and trilliums (indigenous to the Saugeen territory) to consider their histories (how they came to be on the land) and their medicinal properties. At the center of my metaphorical bag writes Kahgee, is cultural knowledge that is deeply woven into the land. Plants are also connected to understanding the world in terms of change, transformation, survival and interconnectedness.