I just wanted to tell the online world that I am beginning my journey of my Master of Fine Arts! Very exciting! I’m moving to Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario! I’ve been admitted to the University of Waterloo’s MFA program and will be starting in September.
The film chronicles the historic Oka Crisis of 1990 where community members protested against a housing and golf-course expansion project that would encroach on a pine forest and burial ground on Mohawk territory.
You know what we should all consciously do more often? Watch more films directed by women. I am making it a goal to watch the following films by the end of April 2020 (updated to end of 2021). Feel free to follow along on my journey of learning! (Note that this is a personal list of films I want to see. There are many other amazing films by women not included on this list. Also the numbers mean nothing, just the order I thought of them in.)
Being a woman makes me hyper-aware of being watched. People are constantly looking at me, up and down, observing my outfit, how much of my body is visible, how much make-up I am wearing, etc etc. I know other women will deeply understand this experience. Of pretending you aren’t aware someone is looking at you, especially when that person is a man. This is compounded when you are a young queer femme.
Queer women are judged. We are examined. We are checked out. We are scrutinized. We are searched. We are ogled. We are constantly under surveillance.
Finding balance has been an important topic for me as I have previously found myself caught in a spiral of procrastination due to my tendencies towards perfectionism, and admittedly still occasionally do.
Coated with imagery of the local Haitian practices of Vodou and Kanaval, this reflexive narrative was created through direct collaboration between Casanova and his film students from the Ciné Institute of Jacme. The film simultaneously questions the ethics of its ethnographic filmmaking, while also exploring the aftermath of colonialism in Haiti.
The element that really irked me about this set was that, aside from myself, almost all the background actors were literal highschool students. They were children. They didn’t know they could say no to staying late, or stand up against anything else that wasn’t okay on that set. They were learning that this is the norm on film sets -- that unfair working conditions is the standards and that you shouldn’t say anything against it.
Zvyagintsev’s 2003 film takes place over the course of a single week, and explores the the reuniting of two young sons with their estranged father as the three embark on a vacation turned cryptic road trip. The youngest son Ivan (Ivan Dobronravov) is the most skeptical of this new paternal figure, while teenaged Andrey (Vladimir Garin) idealizes his father (Konstantin Lavronenko).
Vancouver’s largest film festival has almost arrived, and we all must prepare for the tsunami of contemporary films that will soon wash across our eyes. It might seem like an overwhelming task, but you can prepare yourself!