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Mike Rollo

História

Mike Rollo’s work explores alternative approaches to documentary cinema — methods which thematize vanishing cultures and transitional spaces through references to memory, history, religion, and autobiography. A founding member of Montreal’s experimental film collective Double Negative, Mike has curated the work of prominent international and Canadian experimental filmmakers. Currently, he is a member of Independent Visions a curatorial incubator devoted to making independent and experimental media accessible to a diverse audience in Regina. Mike’s films have shown at festivals, galleries, and conferences across Canada and internationally. His film Ghosts and Gravel Roads (2008) was honoured as one of Canada’s Top Ten Shorts in 2008 by the Toronto International Film Group and received the Mikeldi Silver Documentary Award at the 50th Edition of the International Festival of Documentary and Short Film of Bilbao. Mike’s latest works include The Broken Altar (2013) and au bord de la rivière (2014). Mike teaches film production at the University of Regina.

Filmes

Director

P L U M E responds to a 2019 State of Canada’s Birds Report issued by Environment and Climate Change Canada that the diversity and abundance of Canada’s birds are in sharp decline. Thinking about this report and the effects of climate change and our interconnectedness with the natural world, I became an avid bird watcher, recording bird songs and collecting and labelling discarded feathers and down blends. The images in P L U M E are imprints from feathers soaked in a plant-based developer solution, a phytogram technique developed by filmmaker Karel Doing, and reanimated using optical printing and digital editing techniques.

Director

The seer passes beneath branches, crosses fields, observes the quiet corners of creation. Bright and dark take turns showing their faces, a two-sided phantasm, one energy shape-shifting through time. The seer makes note, gleans eidolons.

Farewell Transmission

Farewell Transmission

Director

[14:05 | 16mm to HD | Stereo Sound | 2017] The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation opened the doors of the CBK Transmitter Station in 1939 to serve the prairie region of Canada. Farewell Transmission is equal parts indexical record of the demolition of CBK in 2015 and subjective response to the residual media documenting the event. The building is framed with tension preceding its destruction: emulsion pulsates as if with decades of radio transmission, creating an unsettled eulogy for a cultural institution.

Director

A space between spaces. Super 8 / Sound / 3:45

au bord de la rivière

au bord de la rivière

Director

[3:07 | 16mm to HD | Sound | 2014] An unblinking examination of the light and movement patterns that animate a river bank; an earthly mysticism in miniature, a professing of natural secrets hidden in plain sight

The Hunter Hunted

The Hunter Hunted

Director

[3:20 | Super 8 | Silent | 2013] In search of a subject, I hunted. I found it in myself.

The Broken Altar

The Broken Altar

Director

[19:30 | 35mm (1.85) | Stereo Sound | 2013] The Broken Altar is a portrait of open-air theaters documented under the strange light of day, emptied of the once present hum of human voices, radioed-in soundtracks and tires on gravel. Scripting the landscape and exploring the residue of a cinematic history, The Broken Altar forms a sculptural treatment of the architectural artifacts of these abandoned and barren spaces: speaker boxes rise from tall grass like grave markers and the screens themselves are monumental, sepulchral in their peeling whiteness.

Director

[3:00 | 16mm | B & W | Mono | 2008] Through the eyes of pure content in light and darkness, to objects strange and shifting, a cat’s curiousity of all things moving.

Ghosts and Gravel Roads

Ghosts and Gravel Roads

Director

[16:00 | Super 16mm – HD | Colour | Stereo | 2008] An inventory of lost memories and places, the sun-bleached landscape of Saskatchewan serves as a metaphor for displacement, a framing of emptiness and absence. Traveling to forgotten towns and channeled through old family photographs the camera catalogs the haunting remnants of the past, frail monuments and communities laid bare, broken under economic collapse. Under the weight of the prairie skies a visceral, personal encounter is revealed in the solace of open space.

Director

[3:20 | Super 8 and HD versions available| B&W| 2006] Patiently, a soft breeze enters.