Editor
“There’s a bus stop I want to photograph.” This may sound like a parody of an esoteric festival film, but Canadian Christopher Herwig’s photography project is entirely in earnest, and likely you will be won over by his passion for this unusual subject within the first five minutes. Soviet architecture of the 1960s and 70s was by and large utilitarian, regimented, and mass-produced. Yet the bus stops Herwig discovers on his journeys criss-crossing the vast former Soviet Bloc are something else entirely: whimsical, eccentric, flamboyantly artistic, audacious, colourful. They speak of individualism and locality, concepts anathema to the Communist doctrine. Herwig wants to know how this came to pass and tracks down some of the original unsung designers, but above all he wants to capture these exceptional roadside way stations on film before they disappear.
Director
Caribou is an 11 minute science fiction experimental portrait of Saskatchewan. Structurally it is a journey from the forests of northern Saskatchewan to the Badlands in the south. It is the final part in a series of North American landscape films and videos that I have been shooting for the past few years. Caribou is essentially a video about mortality, death, decay, notions of beauty, and a respect for the natural world. It is grounded in the detail of our surroundings, and the beauty that resonates from these hidden places.
Director
Dead Horse Point is a film that expresses my feelings of ambivalence for the western genre, and America as a nation. It is the fourth part in a series of North American landscape films that I have been shooting since 2003. It essentially deals with the notion of "the old west," "the frontier," the blurred line between historical fact and myth, the role of Hollywood in the historical process, the importance of celebrity in America, and finally the influence that the western landscape has had in defining the mythology of "the old west." Jason Britski
Director
"Transfixed" is a meditative film that celebrates the beauty found within the small details of existence. "'Transfixed' evokes the boundless joy of the vicarious unlimited experience of childhood, while at the same time reminding us of life's accelerated velocity and transitory nature." - Antimatter Underground Film Festival, 2002
Director
"Exteriors" is a portrait of a young woman and the landscape she inhabits. It is about the walls people construct, real or imaginary. "Poignant and poetic, the work engages our notions of the 'moving image.'" - Photophobia Film Festival 2000
Director
"You would make a good lawyer" is a film about employment, and the cages we all inhabit. The title is taken from a fortune that I kept receiving from fortune cookies, which seemed to capture the irony of my predicament perfectly. (JB)
