Film And Video

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/10315/26545

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Now showing 1 - 20 of 149

Access status: Open Access ,
Young Poirot: An Origin Story
(2026-03-10) Synenko, Anna; Montanari, Fabio
Young Poirot: An Origin Story (YP) is a one-hour television pilot and bible, that reimagines the early life of Agatha Christie’s iconic detective, Hercule Poirot and attempts to construct an origin narrative in the absence of clear canonical or textual precedents. As such, the idea of crafting a prequel became a critical and creative inquiry into how one builds narrative and character depth when there is little-to-no backstory that exists in the original materials. Imagining Poirot’s past is a study in balancing creative innovation with ethical responsibility. Through a dialogue with past texts, outmoded genres, and audience collective memory, Young Poirot (YP) balances creative innovation with a sense of responsibility in the storytelling process. The script and bible proposes not simply a narrative prequel, but a critical reflection on adaptation as a transformative and morally complex act. We see how tensions between invention and authenticity, past and present, coalesce.
Access status: Open Access ,
My Mommy Movie(s)
(2026-03-10) Ruscinski, Simon Edward Guy Paul; Becker, Manfred
My Mommy Movie(s) is an essay film about the difficulty of capturing a human life and transforming it into a work of cinematic entertainment. The film utilizes a variety of different forms and filmic styles to attempt to tell a non-traditional story of a relationship between mother and son. This hybrid approach included the use of archival material from my childhood, discarded footage from my own personal archive as a filmmaker, public domain footage and music from the internet, verite-esque documentary footage of the present, as well as the footage from an unreleased fiction film about my mother. The combination of these seemingly disparate sources all work to try and honestly capture the uncapturable, the essence of an individual.
Access status: Open Access ,
What if an Hourglass Felt Like an Earthquake?: Explorations in Queerness and Vibration
(2026-03-10) Logue, Deirdre Margaret; Davila, Patricio
This thesis explores the evolving relationship between the body, queerness, performance for the camera, and vibration through experimental media art practices. The intention behind the creation of the artworks was to initiate a major shift in my artmaking process, one that moved beyond familiar methods and rationales, prompting a deeper inquiry into why and how I make art. Using everyday objects, image, sound, and vibration, both in physical and affective terms, I investigate the body as a central subject, focusing on its relationship to circumstance and sensation. This process-oriented approach allows for a destabilization of previous working methods in favour of new experiential and conceptual ground. This support paper uses experimental writing methods to reflect on my artistic lineage, drawing from queer, feminist, and art theory to contextualize the works and their development. It examines the theoretical, historical, and personal frameworks that inform the exhibition and my ongoing exploration of the sensorial to expand the possibilities of accessibility.
Access status: Open Access ,
Imperial Green
(2026-03-10) Lacosse, Zachary Daniel; Becker, Manfred
Imperial Green is a 66-minute experimental autofiction film by filmmaker Zachary Lacosse, loosely structured as a reimagining of his life prior to relocating to Toronto. Set in Metrotown, a suburban district of Burnaby, British Columbia, the film foregrounds a place that has exerted a formative influence on Lacosse since childhood. Through a personal and introspective lens, the work explores struggles with Christian-tainted identity and the ways these internal tensions shaped his relationships with his mixed-Indigenous father and his fiancée at the time. Conceived alongside his decision to attend York University, Imperial Green reflects Lacosse’s desire to enter the world as an individual, charting the emotional and psychological pitfalls inherent in the process of becoming. Shot in high-framerate 60fps, it is a diaristic retelling of a crucial point in the filmmakers life, as well as an examination on urbanization, the automobile, and masculine impotence.
Access status: Open Access ,
Golden Boys
(2025-11-11) Griffin, Steven Paul; Montanari, Fabio Basso
Golden Boys is a 102-page fiction screenplay centered around Salem and Caleb, two teenage boys and best friends, who are spending one of the last days of their summer break together, as their lives are about to move in different directions. Both boys struggle with self-image, insecurities, young love, personal expectations, and attempting to maintain their slowly disintegrating friendship. The boys' long-lasting friendship comes to a head, and they gain perspective on how instrumental the other has been in shaping their lives. Taking a traditional American teen comedy and reframing it within a modern Canadian context, this film explores how collective memory and cultural influences recontextualize our identities amidst societal changes in Wasaga Beach, Ontario. Developed using primary and secondary research, as well as first-hand accounts, this script reflects a personal journey of artistic self-discovery and acceptance, echoed in the escapades of the central characters. This paper documents the process of reaching the idea for Golden Boys, finding a specific film reference as a starting point, and navigating the merging of genre and social awareness within the cultural context of a grander film lexicon and an authentic Canadian portrayal of Wasaga Beach.
Access status: Open Access ,
Magpie Online
(2025-11-11) Dovolis, Christina Georgia Tia; Ng-Chan, Taien
Magpie Online is a new media installation that explores the migration from material public spaces to online environments, focusing on the multiplayer platform Decentraland. Much like “real” life, users create avatars and construct homes, parks, clubs, and other urban infrastructures. One user likens Decentraland to a magpie’s nest—an externalized archive of selfhood, where each digital object becomes a reflection of identity. The installation weaves together interviews with four Decentraland users, platform footage, original animation, machinima, and archival imagery tracing the evolution of North American public space. Drawing from urban analysis, Magpie Online explores how virtual worldbuilding reshapes our sense of belonging, embodiment, and community. How is identity forged in digital realities? What do we gain—and lose—when our social lives are mediated online? And, to what extent should we distinguish between “real” and “virtual” life? Magpie Online invites viewers to consider what it means to be part of a world increasingly built on-screen.
Access status: Open Access ,
LAAT
(2025-11-11) Zargar, Saeid; Barta, Tereza
LAAT is a short hybrid documentary that offers a glimpse into the world of Tehran’s elderly lutis and the emotions they confront in the twilight of their lives as they reflect on their past. The film explores their role in the Iranian 1953 coup, a perspective that is often overlooked, seen through the eyes of a former child labourer who witnessed the events firsthand. Through interviews with participants and eyewitnesses, as well as archival footage, it explores how a gang of luti figures helped ignite the chaos that led to the fall of Mohammad Mossadegh’s government, a pivotal moment in the country’s political history that not only disrupted the elite but also shattered the hopes and dreams of the working class, leaving a deep wound on the soul of modern Iran, one that has yet to heal. This film, grounded in research on different aspects of luti culture and history, as well as its portrayal in post-coup Iranian cinema, seeks to offer an authentic representation of the luti character, a rebel figure whose presence in both politics and cinema has been marked with controversy and debate.
Access status: Open Access ,
Somewhere Between Not Knowing
(2025-11-11) Farah, Alexander; Greyson, John R.
Somewhere Between Not Knowing is a 14-minute single-channel installation that traces three life stages—childhood, adolescence, and adulthood—of Hamed, a queer Afghan-Canadian man navigating curiosity, shame, and desire amid the weight of family expectation and cultural silencing. A child’s voiceover recites excerpts of David Wojnarowicz’s prophetic 1990 poem Untitled (One Day This Kid…), translated into Farsi, layered with intertitles that punctuate and fracture the semi-autobiographical vignettes. Inspired by the legacy of visual artists who have regularly appropriated antecedent work, the installation employs remix and recontextualization as artistic strategies, echoing Wojnarowicz’s text while refracting it through a diasporic, queer coming-of-age archive. The work interrogates memory, representation, and reflection, asking how a universal queer text transforms when spoken through another language, another voice, and another body.
Access status: Open Access ,
A Bunch of Times
(2025-11-11) Putnam, Tavis Johnson; Barta, Tereza
A comedic short film about intergenerational male discourse and the nuances of sexuality, A Bunch of Times centres around a recently married middle-aged man named Gord, and his ultimately inappropriate attempts to build a rapport with his new teenaged stepson, Kevin. Throughout the film, Gord becomes more and more desperate to double down on his tactic of teasing Kevin by commenting on the many attractive women, and the many sexual situations within the Game of Thrones-style TV show they are watching—which he is certain Kevin finds just as titillating as he does; whether he will admit it or not. As things become more and more uncomfortable for both Kevin and his mother, Susan, Kevin begins to turn Gord’s suggestive questions and comments back on him, culminating in a poignant catharsis wherein the two share an over-the-top, dramatic embrace befitting the medieval fantasy epic TV show they are watching.
Access status: Open Access ,
René Highway’s Dance Legacy Through a Decolonial Lens
(2025-11-11) Mumford, Cara; Greyson, John R.
This paper examines René Highway’s "Prism, Mirror, Lens" (1989) through an evolving creative process that shifted from plans for live, land-based choreography to an archival, layered, and speculative practice. Highway’s choreography troubles dominant readings of queerness not through overt representation, but through abstraction, fractured narrative, and refusal of easy interpretation. Working with degraded VHS footage, phytograms, and experimental layering, the project reframed editing as choreography, composing rhythm, dissonance, and layered perception from archival materials. Interviews with Highway’s collaborators activated memory as embodied knowledge, extending the work beyond the stage. Engaging with absence, distortion, and fragmented archives revealed that knowledge can emerge from flicker, multiplicity, and refusal of singular meaning. In this way, "Prism, Mirror, Lens" and the resulting film insist on queerness as method—holding space for speculative survival and positioning Indigenous performance as a site of both cultural continuity and futurist possibility.
Access status: Open Access ,
You May Start the Conversation Now: Two Exercises in Collaboration Towards Abolition
(2025-11-11) Li, Kristin; Greyson, John R.
You May Start the Conversation Now: Two Exercises in Collaboration Towards Abolition is a portfolio of two screen-based collaborations between Kriss Li and Amber Kim, a prisoner in Washington State. The first piece, Abolition Film Society: Flipbook Cinema is a multi-media installation composed of a two-channel silent video, five flipbooks based on the video, and a publication of conversations between Kriss and Amber. The piece emerged out of a six-month reading group. The second project, You May Start the Conversation Now, is a twenty-minute short film that documents a day of rehearsals with two actors performing science fiction dialogues co-written by Amber and Kriss through a game of exquisite corpse. This support paper will examine the obstacles, frictions, and possibilities for solidarity in artistic co-creations between people inside and outside prison, examined within the context of a broader movement to abolish prisons.
Access status: Open Access ,
The Haenyeo Project
(2025-11-11) Rodriguez Alarcon, Camilo Ernesto; Johnson, Susan C.
The Haenyeo Project is a 22-minute grounded science fiction film set in 1990’s Northern Ontario, following 16-year-old Jane, a second-generation Korean-Canadian, as she confronts identity, cultural belonging, and a mysterious family legacy. After discovering her estranged grandmother, an elderly Haenyeo diver who transforms into a sea creature, Jane wonders if she has inherited this rare ability. Blending speculative fiction with cultural history, the film reimagines the real-world Haenyeo of Jeju Island as carriers of ancestral power. The project explores how grounded sci-fi can illuminate immigrant experiences and intergenerational trauma. Developed through primary and secondary research, location shooting, and character-driven storytelling, the film reflects the filmmaker’s personal negotiation of cultural hybridity. This MFA thesis support paper documents the film’s development from concept to completion and argues that science fiction rooted in lived realities can challenge dominant narratives, reframing difference as strength and offering alternative ways to understand belonging, inheritance, and transformation.
Access status: Open Access ,
TIDES
(2025-07-23) Huras, Jessica Elizabeth; Montanari, Fabio Basso
Thesis Screenplay Title: Tides © Jessica Huras 2025, Masters in Screenwriting, Feature length dramatic screenplay adaptation of the novel Tides by Sara Freeman After a stillbirth, 39-year-old Mara leaves her life in Montreal, unable to bear the weight of her grief or the presence of her husband, Lucien, or her brother, Paul, and his wife with their newborn baby. Seeking escape, she arrives in a remote Nova Scotia seaside town, where the vast tidal swells reflect her teetering between self-annihilation and self-preservation. As the possibility of connection and the slow return of desire begin to draw her back to herself, scenes from her past unfold, revealing moments of intimacy and estrangement. Through these memories, Mara confronts her grief and begins to carve a new path forward. My research examines how grief shapes a woman’s capacity for connection, autonomy, and self-reconstruction after loss. Additionally, I explore the visual representation of grief in film and how isolation and relationality function as catalysts for redefining identity.
Access status: Open Access ,
The General's Son
(2025-04-10) Onuora, Angela Nnenne; Kazimi, Ali
The General’s Son is a 20-minute narrative drama that explores the raw, emotional complexity of General Cuba Wusalanga’s struggle with guilt, loss, and his longing for redemption. Set against a backdrop of allegorical African cultural elements, the film uses intimate cinematography, opulent aesthetics contrasted with isolating vastness, and symbolic imagery to represent underlying themes. The narrative underscores the tension and subsequent resignation of the General, as he grapples with the revelation of his monstrous nature. The vision intends for the audience to empathize with the General's predicament, inciting introspection and dialogue about societal cycles of corruption, and the potential to break free from them.
Access status: Open Access ,
Controlled Burn: 28 Lessons from the Edit Suite
(2025-04-10) Howie, Peter James; Trifonova, Temenuga
Controlled Burn is a 20-minute live-action fiction film which follows Reid as he spends the last day of parole doing all the things that got him there in the first place: drug deals, petty larceny, and reconnecting with an old fling named Marty. When Marty reveals a plan to escape the country forever, Reid discovers Marty’s true intentions.
Access status: Open Access ,
Fort Garry Lions Pool
(2024-11-07) Steel, Ryan Douglas; Djigo, Moussa
“Fort Garry Lions Pool” is an experimental film about two young women climbing the fence into a public pool at night. This paper tracks the creation of the film from its inception in 2020, production in 2022, up until its completion in 2024. The role of intuition as both subject matter and guiding creative tool is examined. This paper is also a reflection on the collaborative filmmaking process, charting the attempts made to foster a non-hierarchical working environment. The film's thematic and stylistic choices are also explored, centering around the symbolic role the Fort Garry Lions Pool plays in representing the revealing and understanding of trauma within a close friendship.
Access status: Open Access ,
The First Indigenous Female Pornographer
(2024-11-07) Whitecrow, Jamie Lee; Becker, Manfred
THE FIRST INDIGENOUS FEMALE PORNOGRAPHER is a mockumentary film running (13 minutes and 20 seconds) that blends and bends archival, pornography, re-enactments, and the only existing interview with Audrey Little-breast, “the first Indigenous female pornographer,” as she refuses to be labelled or represented as anything but herself. She is interviewed about her notorious pornography that exploits settler desire of “Imaginary Indians”. The film is a comedy that playfully engages the subjects of Indigenous identity, the politics of recognition, the “playing Indian” phenomenon, and Canada’s hottest piece of tail - The Beaver. We are invited to ponder how deeply historical and contemporary settler-indigenous relations impact our sexuality.
Access status: Open Access ,
Cherub
(2024-11-07) Shears, Devin; Greyson, John
Cherub is a 73 minute narrative film centred around a fat, single man named Harvey who comes across a gay magazine for “big men and their admirers” and decides to create an erotic pinup photo to be their “Cherub of the Month”. The film is almost entirely free of dialogue, and is made up predominantly of long, locked off shots that work to create a quiet but detailed tableau of this man’s life. Through both the narrative, the form, as well as the production of the film itself, I seek to explore the ways that image making can be a space of agency, desire and tension for fat, queer men.
Access status: Open Access ,
Mutual Pain
(2024-11-07) Keymanesh, Alireza; Veninger, Ingrid
Mutual Pain is a 29-minute, nonlinear, experimental psychodrama film about love's pain, social violence, and the effect of anxiety on perception. On a pitch-black night, John realizes that his wife had an affair with a mutual friend a few years before. There is now a big question mark over their child’s parentage. Storming out, he finds himself on an intense one-night mysterious journey. The voyage takes him to various places – the street, party club, bar, gambling room, etc. – where he finds himself in a maze of peculiar human beings and incidents. He experiences intense emotional, intellectual, and physical stimulation. Having lost everything and been beaten brutally by a thief, he falls motionless to the ground. Night becomes day. A beggar takes his shoes. Barefoot, he maniacally runs toward the forest. He is guided to his house where he lies down beside his wife in their bed. ‘John, John!’ She calls his name while giving him an intimate hug. ‘Shall we please be silent?’ he answers back.
Access status: Open Access ,
Kilometro 126
(2024-11-07) Lopez Gomez, Felipe; Becker, Manfred
Kilómetro 126 is a 16-minute hybrid short film narrating the day of a young couple as they spend their last time together in their hometown. Focusing on small intimate and fleeting moments from their everyday lives while juxtaposing these scenes with archival stills, the film intends to contrast the settlement of a town with its future, questioning the notion of development and progress in these rural areas. Kilómetro 126 portrays the dreams and aspirations of those who stayed in La Cumbre, a town that once stood for the development and progress of Colombia.

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