Curated by Yani Kong, this collection of films demonstrates ways to practice flexibility in scale and perspective, thinking and seeing with plants, trees, animals, rocks, and points of view that are rarely centred. From a grain of sand to the inner world of a child, these short films experiment with non-human centred scales, and explore how we can enter into more effective combinations with/in the cosmos.
Wednesday April 16 | 7:00-8:30pm
Richmond Cultural Centre, 7700 Minoru Gate (map)
FREE Admission. Register Now.
Presented in partnership with the City of Richmond, this screening is part of “Who Roams the Earth,” Cinevolution’s 2025 National Canadian Film Day Program. National Canadian Film Day is an initiative of Reel Canada.
About the Curator
Yani Kong is a writer, editor, and scholar of contemporary art in Vancouver, Canada. She has published essays for The Photographer’s Gallery, London, UK; The Gordon and Marion Smith Foundation, Vancouver BC; The Freedman Gallery, Reading PA, and is a regular contributor to Galleries West. Kong hold a Doctorate in Contemporary Art from the School for the Contemporary Arts (SCA) at SFU, where she researched reception aesthetics, ethical philosophy, and contemporary art history. As the managing director of the Small Files Media Society and with the Low Carbon Research Methods Working Group she explores sustainable practices in streaming media and filmmaking. Kong is the Yukon/BC representative for the Universities Arts Association Congress.
Program Details
Out of this World
Director: Martha Dzhenganon | 2024 | 3 min
From the Director: “My practice is a response to the world around me. With an interest in storytelling and DIY culture, I create print and ceramic works. I also explore video and animation as a more dynamic vehicle for conveying narratives. I am interested in processes of storytelling from oral stories to contemporary comics. Oral stories have been used as a communication tool to discuss complex issues and relate to each other. I believe that drawing from these shared stories helps an audience relate to my work on a more familiar level.”
The Botanist
Director: Maude Plante-Husaruk and Maxime Lacoste-Lebuis | 2016 | 20 min | Russian with English subtitles
After the fall of the Soviet Union, Tajikistan, a former Soviet Socialist Republic, plunged into a devastating civil war. A famine struck the mountainous region of the Pamir where Raïmberdi, a passionate and ingenious botanist, built his own hydroelectric station to help his family survive through the crisis.
About the Directors
Maude Plante-Husaruk is a Canadian documentary photographer and filmmaker whose work focuses on marginalized populations and inspiring humanistic stories of resilience and dignity, eager to show the common denominators that bring us together. Her first co-directed short film The Botanist has been screened at Hot Docs, TIFF Top Ten, AFI Docs and has won numerous awards including Best Short Film at RIDM (Montreal’s international Documentary Festival).
Maxime Lacoste-Lebuis (Max LL), is an award-winning composer and filmmaker who’s been crafting evocative musical works for picture for more than a decade. His music has been performed by Montreal’s Metropolitan Orchestra and is regularly featured in films, games and audio-visual projects around the globe.
Mia’
Directors: Amanda Strong and Bracken Hanuse Corlett | 2015 | 9 min
Mia’ tells the story of an Indigenous teen’s struggles to find her way home as she navigates through polluted land, water and skies, witnessing various forms of industrial imprint and violence that have occurred upon the land.
Co-directed by Amanda Strong and Bracken Hanuse Corlett, this hybrid documentary using animation and sound as a vehicle to tell the story of transformation and reconnection. A film that challenges the notions and format of conventional documentaries to present Indigenous oral traditions as truth and not myth or legend, Mia’ premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) in 2015.
About the Directors
Amanda Strong is a Michif (Metis) interdisciplinary artist with a focus on filmmaking, stop motion animations and media art. Currently based on unceded Coast Salish territories also known as Vancouver, BC, Canada. With a cross-discipline focus, common themes of her work are reclamation of Indigenous histories, lineage, language and culture. Strong is the Owner/Director/Producer of Spotted Fawn Productions Inc. (SFP). Her films have screened across the globe, most notably at Cannes, TIFF, VIFF, and Ottawa International Animation Festival (Biidaaban The Dawn Comes; Four Faces of the Moon; Flood).
Bracken Hanuse Corlett is a multimedia artist hailing from the Wuikinuxv and Klahoose Nations. He got his start in theatre and performance and has since transitioned into a focus on digital-media, live-visual installation/performance and visual arts. He is the co-founder of the Vancouver Indigenous Media Arts Festival and over the last four years he has performed across the country as a member of the audio-visual collective, Skookum Sound System. He is a graduate of the En’owkin Centre of Indigenous Art and the Emily Carr University of Art and Design, and has studied Northwest Coast art, carving and design. Mia’ is his first film.
Persistence & Loss
Director: Joseph Clark | 2021 | Experimental | 4 min
An experimental work about film, memory, and deforestation. Incorporating found footage from sponsored and educational films, Persistence & Loss examines the traces of presence and absence in cinema, the archive, and on the landscape itself.
About the Director
Joseph Clark is a lecturer in film studies at Simon Fraser University. His research, teaching and creative work focus on archival and non-theatrical media, including newsreels, home movies, and sponsored film. He is a long-time member of the DOXA Documentary Film Festival Programming Committee and part of the organizing committee of the Vancouver Podcast Festival. He is the author of News Parade: The American Newsreel and the World as Spectacle.
Persistence & Loss is Clark’s first film.
Very Nice, Very Nice
Director: Arthur Lipsett | 1961 | Experimental | 7 min
Arthur Lipsett’s first film is an avant-garde blend of photography and sound. It looks behind the business-as-usual face we put on life and shows anxieties we want to forget. It is made of dozens of pictures that seem familiar, with fragments of speech heard in passing and, between times, a voice saying, “Very nice, very nice.” It was critically acclaimed and plays frequently in festivals and film schools around the world.
Nominated for Best Live Action Short, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Hollywood, 1962
About the Director
“Almost two decades after his death Arthur Lipsett remains an anomaly within Canadian and avant-garde film histories. Uneasily oscillating between an artisanal tradition and the National Film Board’s institutional mandate “to interpret Canada for Canadians”, he was a popular experimental filmmaker whose eccentric, satirical collage films were internationally renowned.” – Brett Kashmere (July 2004), Senses of Cinema, Issue 32
“To this day, Lipsett’s work and creative process—his instinctive approach and striking stream-of-consciousness montage technique—are shrouded in mystery, and his canonical films continue to inspire artists around the world. He has been the subject of recent documentaries such as Theodore Ushev’s Lipsett Diaries (2010) and Eric Gaucher’s The Arthur Lipsett Project: A Dot on the Histomap (2007).” – “Arthur Lipsett,” National Film Board Website
Film provided courtesy of the National Film Board of Canada.
Free Fall, for Camera
Brendan Fernandes | 2019 | 14 min
Free Fall, for Camera is a large-scale, multimedia dance and video installation. Initiated by a Canada Council for the Arts, Special Projects, Canada 150 Grant, Free Fall, for Camera explores the falling body as a metaphor for queer politic.
A film by Brendan Fernandes / Producers — Sandy Pearl and Clyde Wagner / Choreography in collaboration with — Hit & Run Dance Productions Inc. / Dancers: Alexandria, Benjamin Landsberg, Caryn Chappell, Christopher Valentini, Connor Mitton, Elizabeth Gagnon, Halley Brentt, Kaitlin Torrance, Logan Kinney, Lonii Garnons-Williams, Natayu Mildenberger, Nicole Rose Bond, Nyda Kwasowsky, Roney Lewis, Shawn Louis, Sol Silvestri / Editor — Michael Pierro / Sound — Alex Inglizian / Director Photography — Daniel Grant
About the Director
Brendan Fernandes is an internationally recognized artist working at the intersection of dance and visual arts. Based in Chicago, Brendan’s projects address issues of race, queer culture, migration, protest and other forms of collective movement. Committed to creating new spaces and new forms of agency, Brendan’s projects take on hybrid forms: part Ballet, part queer dance party, part protest . . . to foster collaboration and solidarity through actions of generosity and kindness. Brendan is a graduate of the Whitney Independent Study Program and a recipient of a Robert Rauschenberg Fellowship.
Sisters and Brothers
Director: Kent Monkman | 2015 | Documentary | 3 min
In a pounding critique of Canada’s colonial history, this short film draws parallels between the annihilation of the bison in the 1890s and the devastation inflicted on the Indigenous population by the residential school system.
This film is part of Souvenir, a series of four films addressing Indigenous identity and representation by reworking material in the NFB’s archives.
About the Director
Kent Monkman is an interdisciplinary Cree visual artist. Known for his thought-provoking interventions into Western European and American art history, Monkman explores themes of colonization, sexuality, loss, and resilience—the complexities of historic and contemporary Indigenous experiences—across painting, film/video, performance, and installation.
Film provided courtesy of the National Film Board of Canada.
Lake
Director: Alexandra Lazarowich | 2019 | Documentary | 5 min
Director Alexandra Lazarowich riffs off classic verité cinema to craft a contemporary portrait of Métis women net fishing in Northern Alberta.
About the Director
Alexandra Lazarowich is an award-winning Cree filmmaker originally from northern Alberta, Canada. Her short documentary Fast Horse premiered and won the Special Jury Award for Directing at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival. Alexandra’s body of work as a director, series producer, and writer includes CBC’s Stuff the British Stole, SYFY’s Resident Alien S3, CBC’s Still Standing, Lake, A Portrait in Red, Out of Nothing, Cree Code Talker, Empty Metal, and Alvaro. She is one of the co-founders of the Indigenous experimental not-for-profit Cousin Collective.
Film provided courtesy of the filmmaker.
Nanitic
BC Premiere
Director: Carol Nguyen | 2022 | Drama | 15 min | Vietnamese, English with English subtitles
na· nit· ic / adjective: “The first brood of worker ants produced by a queen ant using only the reserved nutrition in her body. Nanitics shoulder the initial fate of the colony and are often underfed due to the conditions in colony building. Thus, nanitics may be smaller in size from later workers ants to optimize the survival of the group…” — But what happens to the colony when the queen dies? Had the nanitics done enough?
9 year-old Trang starts to shift out of oblivion as her aunt Ut tends to Grandma, who lies in her deathbed in the living room. How can a single body occupy so much space? What will happen when Grandma is gone?
About the Director
Carol Nguyen is a Vietnamese Canadian filmmaker, born and raised in Toronto, now based in Montreal. Her films often explore the subjects of cultural identity, silence and memory. Her newest film “Nanitic” (2022) premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival and was selected for Berlinale Generation Kplus. Her previous film “No Crying at the Dinner Table” (2019) also screened at TIFF alongside IDFA, where she was additionally invited as the Opening Night speaker. In 2020, “No Crying” received the Jury Prize for Short Documentary at South by Southwest (SXSW). Carol is a 2018 Sundance Ignite fellow and a TIFF Share Her Journey ambassador. Recently, her project “The Visitors” was selected for the IDFA Project Space 2022, a development lab for first- or second-time directors. Today, Carol is writing and directing several projects, including two feature films as well as an animated short.
Acknowledgements
Presented in partnership with the City of Richmond. National Canadian Film Day is an initiative of Reel Canada.