Location: SFU Woodwards - Djavad Mowafaghian Theatre, 3rd floor + Digital Library
Available with:
All Access Pass (In-Person - November 18th at 6PM PST)
+
Digital Screenings Pass (released on our Digital Library November 19th at 8AM PST)
This screening marks our first in-person gathering after two years as an all digital festival. We invite our audiences to re-connect with us in the theatre and join us in witnessing a collection of diverse films made by local and national artists. Together, we gather in a collective celebration of these artists and their imaginative creations which encourage connection to our bodies and to each other.
This screening is split into two collections:
Collection #1: 6PM - 7:15PM
Collection #2: 7:30PM - 9PM with Live Artist Talkback facilitated by Tamar Tabori
COLLECTION #2:
SOFT PALATE - Alexander Thornton
CROSSING WATERS - Candace Kumar
PUAN - Elvina Raharja
NIMÎHTOWIN ASKÎHK | DANCING THE LAND - Jeanette Kotowich
OUT OF: BREATHE - Ashley (Caiyi) Song
MALETA - Sophia ‘Sosa’ Gamboa
COLLECTION #1:
SOMETHING TO FORGET ME BY - Corinne Langmuir, Erin Lum
PAPER MOUNTAINS (OF MEMORY) - Anya Saugstad
VASANTHAM - Ashvini Sundaram
PEACE PIECE - Kaya Joy Tsurumi
NOAH - Sam Adam-Johnston
COLLECTION #1:
SOMETHING TO FORGET ME BY
Corinne Langmuir, Erin Lum | CANADA | YOUTH | WORLD PREMIERE
Duration: 11:50
SOMETHING TO FORGET ME BY is a love letter to friendship, childhood, and bittersweet goodbyes. When two ex-friends reunite after falling out, they dance through the memories of the summer before they decide to forget each other.
Credits:
Directors: Corinne Langmuir and Erin Lum
Choreographers, Performers: Erin Lum and Shona Kiyama
Editor: Corinne Langmuir
Director of Photography: Belen Garcia
Original Music: Fabio Henao Caviedes
PAPER MOUNTAINS (OF MEMORY)
Anya Saugstad | CANADA | EMERGING
Duration: 13:45
PAPER MOUNTAINS (OF MEMORY) is a film that explores how we hold memory through movement. The work uses choreography created during many months in solitude, and translates that movement onto other bodies, spaces, and paper planes, to describe a fragmented story of loneliness, desire, and rage. PAPER MOUNTAIN (OF MEMORY) is a story about waiting, about how time unfolds unevenly, about our animal selves, our instinct, the distance that unfolds and folds itself between one another, our rage in desire, our bodies as vessels that empty and fill with memory of which it chooses to hold on to or let go endlessly without warning.
Credits:
Choreographer, Director: Anya Saugstad
Performers: Daria Mikhaylyuk, Eowynn Enquist, Nasiv Sall, Sabine Raskin, Shion Skye Carter
Cinematographer, Lighting: Bray Jorstad
Music, Sound: Stefan Nazarevich
VASANTHAM
Ashvini Sundaram | CANADA | EMERGING | VANCOUVER PREMIERE
Duration: 5:19
A dancer investigates her relationship with practicing the Varnam, a specialized repertory item in bharatanatyam dance. The Varnam, embodied by thousands of women over two centuries, is about unrequited passion. It is about unfulfilled expectations, physical and emotional depletion, and spiritual reveal. The Tamil-Canadian dancer confronts what practicing the Varnam means to her, in a space that nurtures her many layers of longing and exhaustion. Vasantham, the title of the film, is a Tamil word describing the season of spring.
Credits:
Director: Allison Hrabluik
Producer, Choreographer, Performer: Ashvini Sundaram
Director of Photography: Robert Mentov
Dramaturg: Karen Kaeja
Music Composer: Kalaisan Kalaichelvan
Assistant Director: Arpita Bajpeyi
PEACE PIECE
Kaya Joy Tsurumi | CANADA | YOUTH | VANCOUVER PREMIERE
Duration: 6:01
PEACE PIECE is a short film made by Kaya Tsurumi and Taitania Higuchi. This film is loosely based on Kaya’s experiences folding origami throughout the course of the pandemic, and a collection of her photographs featuring paper cranes in spaces that feel like home. Unravelling, settling, repeating, fitting in - all aspects of the comforting mechanism that Kaya finds in the Japanese craft of origami, specifically the symbolic and iconic “tsuru” (crane). PEACE PIECE hopes to inspire the viewer to consider the great joys of their everyday activities.
Credits:
Director, Performer, Editor: Kaya Tsurumi
Cinematographer, Editor: Taitania Higuchi
This film was made with the support of Dance West Network's 2021/2022 Ancillary Project, which involved a mentorship with Lisa Gelley, collaboration with Taitania Higuchi and writing by Sarah Wong.
NOAH
Sam Adam-Johnston | CANADA | YOUTH | WORLD PREMIERE
Duration: 12:17
NOAH is a non-dialogue film that attempts to showcase the patterns and similarities between skateboarding and dance through movement and expression.
Credits:
Director: Sam Adam-Johnston
Starring: Oliver New, Naomi Gwynn
Cinematographer: Daynis Zed
Sound Design: Andre Lorenzana
15 minute intermission
COLLECTION #2:
SOFT PALATE
Alexander Thornton | CANADA | EMERGING
Duration: 10:11
SOFT PALATE is a warm switch, a precious shattering, a vivid feel. A dreamscape not far from here. Close your eyes. Submerge yourself. Under the surface, sensitive creatures thrive. Hidden, nestled, burrowing. SOFT PALATE is a choreographic exploration on perspective and texture as experienced through three characters' journey into a dream world of subconscious reflections.
Credits:
Creator, Performer: Emmalena Fredriksson, in collaboration with Hayley Gawthrop and Jessica Keeling
Video: Alex Thornton
Lighting Design: Taylor Janzen, Gabriel Raminhos
Music: Linda Fox
Photography: Luciana D'Anunciacao
Costumes: Alaia Hamer
CROSSING WATERS
Candace Kumar | CANADA | EMERGING | VANCOUVER PREMIERE
Duration: 7:48
CROSSING WATERS is a cultural reimagination film showcasing first-generation Filipino-Canadian dancers performing contemporized Philippine dance on Scarborough Bluffs Beach. The film depicts Pangalay, the fingernail dance performed by communities in the Sulu Archipelago in the southern Philippines. The movements are slow and meditative, imitating the Sulu Sea combined with modern hip hop music and street dance styles. This film aims to connect Pangalay across the Canadian Filipino diaspora and shed light on Filipino culture in the Canadian dance space.
Credits:
Director, Choreographer: Candace Kumar
Cinematographer: Ian Simon
Assistant Choreographers: Diana Reyes, Faye Roncesvalles
Cast: Candace Kumar, Diana Reyes, Faye Roncesvalles
Music Composition: Lex Junior
Indigenous Culture Bearer: Sitti Obeso
Co-produced by: Guelph Dance
PUAN
Elvina Raharja | CANADA | YOUTH
Duration: 4:11
PUAN (translation: woman) explores self-identity and womanhood as a young Indonesian woman towards self-acceptance and liberation. Growing up in Indonesia, almost everything exists in a strict binary, a byproduct of centuries of Dutch colonisation. This limiting structure created impossible standards that affected my culture and upbringing. The pressure to fit into these white supremacist ideals made me feel displaced and dehumanized. This performance was my way to investigate & heal this generational trauma. PUAN is my reminder that I am enough right here, right now, and that I can just “be.” I hope it can give you some peace as well.
Credits:
Creative Director, Choreographer, Dancer: Elvina Raharja
Dramaturge: Queenie Seguban
Director of Photography, Editor: Phil Kim
Sound Editor: Thaniel Johnson
Commissioned by CanAsian Dance for its 2021 Grit: Short Dances program.
NIMÎHTOWIN ASKÎHK | DANCING THE LAND
Jeanette Kotowich | CANADA | EMERGING | VANCOUVER PREMIERE
Duration: 14:25
The creative process of this work took many iterations in the embodied journey to uncover and reveal NIMÎHTOWIN ASKÎHK. What has taken shape is our dynamic and complicated, yet beautiful relationship to DANCING THE LAND - NIMÎHTOWIN ASKÎHK. As we sensitised ourselves to each landscape, it became clear that even in our heartfelt attempts to inhabit our surroundings without imposition, the Land itself has been imposed upon in irreversible & unavoidable ways. And so… we followed our intuition, senses and Spirit in the extraction and shaping of this work. In collaboration with the Land we attuned our ideas to site, weather, sun, cloud, sky, tide and time of day. This process called for our whole selves to be in observation, integration, reflection, and creative activation. Kinanāskomitinān.
"We are born into a world that has both beauty and brokenness. How do we learn to dance with those contradictions and find healing for ourselves and the land?” - Chloe Ziner
Credits:
Concept, Direction, Design, Performance: Jeanette Kotowich
Collaborator, Cinematographer, Drone Operator, Editor: Chloe Ziner
Collaborator, Cinematographer, Projection Design: Jessica Gabriel
Original Sound Design: Roxanne Nesbitt (with Viola by John Kastelic)
'Song for Today' Written and Sung by Jeanette Kotowich, Produced by Kathleen Nisbet
OUT OF: BREATHE
Ashley (Caiyi) Song | CANADA | YOUTH | WORLD PREMIERE
Duration: 3:35
"I'm never good enough..." OUT OF: BREATHE presents anxiety-related bodily movements through collage, animation, and experimental soundscape. This film documents and celebrates the recorded movement of the body as it goes through extreme breathing patterns and out-of-body experiences. Breathing, very much like our day-to-day emotions, is something often overlooked when everything is going fine. Until incidents such as anxiety attacks eliminate the normal breathing pattern, it then places a person in the most vulnerable position gasping for air. This film explores the idea of being "out of breath and unable to breathe" from both physically and emotionally challenged perspectives.
Credits:
Director: Ashley Song
Cinematographer: Coco Zhou
Production Assistant: Alen Kim, Gabriella Hu
Editor: Ashley Song
Music: Kenyama
MALETA
Sophia ‘Sosa’ Gamboa | CANADA | EMERGING | CANADIAN PREMIERE
Duration: 12:17
A 12-minute film encompassing one’s immigrant experience told through a series of imagery, sound and movement. Directed and produced by Sophia Sosa, this story dives deep into the depths of one’s emotions and reflections about identity, language and body. MALETA is a Tagalog word for suitcase. A symbol of a new home because being uprooted, home becomes a non-tangible thing; it becomes a distant memory. But what is it that makes us so special? So glowing? So resilient?
And where is home now?
Credits:
Director, Producer, Performer: Sophia Sosa
Director of Photography: Alinar Dapilos
Assistant Director: Simran Sachar
Sound Design: Josh Cameron
Makeup: Miel Enage
Styling: Mao Watanabe/Sophia Sosa/Susan Laurio