Description

An assortment of short films featuring those with a flair for nostalgia— and looking at the step forward after looking back.

Rainy Days
Vladimir Leschiov | Canada/Latvia 2014 | 8:15

An elderly Japanese man boards a ferry bound for an unknown island. As he looks out over the water, the falling rain triggers a string of memories, including a childhood experience in Fukuoka.

Vladimir Leschiov, a Latvian filmmaker, created the film with a unique animation consisting of black tea and ink on paper and precise, delicately drawn lines. Rainy Days was produced by the National Film Board.

Kore Kara: From Now On
Ivy Yukiko Oldford | Canada, Japan 2013 | 14:35 | Japanese with English subtitles

“Kore kara” is a Japanese phrase used when talking about aspirations and looking ahead to the future. This short film documents kids in post-tsunami Japan, as they look to the future despite the disaster of 2011.

Ivy Yukiko Ishihara Oldford was born in Canada to a Japanese mother and a Canadian father, and raised in both countries. Having produced several short films in Canada, she relocated to Tokyo, where she directed numerous shorts as well as news reports on Japanese topics for TV broadcast. She currently splits her time between Tokyo and Montreal.

Kudok
Cindy Mochizuki, Emma Hendrix | Canada 2012 | 5:30

A conversation with Lennox Johnston-Yu leads us to an imaginary monster by the name of Kudok. This short is taken from an interdisciplinary performance called Mörkö, directed by James Long.

Cindy Mochizuki is an interdisciplinaryartist with a practice that moves across several forms. Her works often explore the space between the fictional and documentary; integrating the archival and interviews as a common thread within the process of her work.

Emma Hendrix is a sound designer and a media artist. His work is focused on creating environments through sound, investigating the delicate state of equilibrium we have with our sonic environment.

Citrus Paradisi
Han Han Li | China/Canada/USA 2013 | 11:00 | Cantonese with English subtitles

This animation-live action hybrid revolves around highly subjective and fragmented memories of lost neighborhoods. Touching upon the problems of gentrification and forced deportation in the old Eastern District of Beijing, the film evokes a soft feeling of melancholia.

Han Han Li revisited her old family home in Beijing recently, and wrote Citrus Paradisi based on a dream she had immediately after Born in Beijing. She is now completing her MFA degree in the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

The Home Promised
Betty Xie* | Canada 2014 | 20:00 | Mandarin and Taiwanese with English subtitles

When residents in an old neighbourhood face eviction, they struggle to fight for relocation. Through this process, they find a home that they never knew they had. As an emerging filmmaker, Betty Xie believes that extraordinary stories are embedded in the everyday life of ordinary people, and she is on a life-long search for the extraordinary/ordinary.

100 Crushes: The Tie
Elisha Lim* | Canada 2014 | 2:00

A father’s gift makes his transgendered child feel loved. “There was such a lifetime of words that I wanted to say to my dad. Instead I just kept saying ‘Thank you’.”

Elisha Lim successfully advocated for Canadian gay media to adopt the gender neutral pronoun ‘they.’ Lim was awarded Best Emerging Director at the 2014 Inside Out Film Festival.

Tears of Inge
Alisi Telengut* | Canada 2013 | 4:21 | Mongolian with English subtitles

Based on a Mongolian nomadic story, the animation takes place after a camel mother abandons her child.

Alisi Telengut used oil pastels on a single ark of paper to make this stopmotion animation. The film also features the singing of her grandmother. Alisi’s works have been culturally engaged and focused on Central Asian nomadic minorities.

1967: A People Kind of Place
Jacqueline Hoang Nguyen* | Canada 2012 | 20:00

The small community of St. Paul, located 300 km north east of Edmonton, inaugurated the world’s first UFO Landing Pad on June 3, 1967, as a symbolic welcome to the whole world and inter-galactic beings to Canada.

Jacqueline Hoang Nguyen is this year’s Canadian Artist Spotlight. This film inspired her to pursue the Making of an Archive Project, currently ongoing throughout the festival. Coupling science fiction and identity politics, the film’s focus revolves around the intersection of the notion of hospitality, diversity, and the implementation of Canada’s radical immigration policy that occurred in the same year and posited the country as the pioneer in multiculturalism.

A Story of Elusive Snow
Minha Park | USA 2013 | 14:33 | Korean with English subtitles

This is a story of a woman who is looking for the snow that remind her of her motherland South Korea in Los Angeles. A personal essay film about artificial snow playfully explores our desire for illusion and magic.

Minha Park is a media artist and filmmaker who lives and works in Los Angeles and Seoul. Her works are mainly presented in screenings and installations. Her recent interest is how cultural, social, and political context affects one’s way of seeing.