Onsite and Online screenings: Film and Motherhood

The film and motherhood curatorial project is comprised of three programs: Experimental Shorts (online and in gallery), Intimate Portraits (online), and Feature Length film (online). Curated by Gabriela Aceves Sepulveda, Sarah Shamash, and prOphecy Sun, the films all speak to the complex relationships to, engendered by, and toward motherhood. As we adapted our program to the conditions of the evolving pandemic, these works are selected from our local context on unceded Coast Salish territory in Vancouver and from international artist-filmmaker-mothers. As practicing media artists and mothers, we considered the roles and challenges of motherhood as explored through the diverse and culturally specific perspectives in the film and video programs presented. The diverse selection of films and videos on varied interpretations of “motherhood,” taken as a whole, self-reflect on the condition of being an artist/filmmaker today. 

The Film and Motherhood program is accompanied by a dialogue with filmmakers: Jules Koostachin, Nadine Valcin, Preta Performance, Clare Yow, Ghinwa Yassine, and Maternal Fantasies. This dialogue will be happening live via zoom on October 16th 2021, at noon PST time.
 

Online Screening

Hosted through VIVO media arts centre:
Experimental Short Program
Mid Length: Intimate Portraits
Feature Length
 

Onsite Screening

(program run time approximately 63 mins)
Gallery hours for screening are 12 to 5pm on 13, 14, 15, 20, 21 and 22 October 2021. Masks must be worn in the gallery at all times. Please see our most recent Covid Safety Protocols for more information.
 

Ariel Kirk-Gushowaty, Flood 2015 (5 mins)
“How do you expect to communicate with the ocean, when you can’t even understand one another?” -Stanisław Lem, Solaris
Flood explores the possibilities of communication in the context of nature and climate change. As the planet heats up, ice melts and sea levels rise.  How can we ask nature to continue to take care of us? How can we take care of nature and ourselves? Can the ocean hear our messages? Shot on Orwo 16mm print stock and processed in caffenol as part of a workshop leading to the creation of a collective group of works on the theme “End of the World.”

Moving Images: Ariel Kirk-Gushowaty
Digital Sound: prOphecy sun
Technical Specs: 16mm film
Country of Production: Canada
 

Gabriela Aceves Sepulveda, Freya Zinovieff, prOphecy sun, Mothering Bacteria 2019 (10:53mins)
Mothering Bacteria is a three channel video that explores maternal notions of caretaking bacteria that resides on and off the skin – and how we can hold symbiotic spaces for co-becoming other. Building on what Butoh dancer Iwana Masaki describes as a process of extricating pure life from our bodies, artists Gabriela Aceves-Sepulveda, prOphecy sun and Freya Zinovieff use expanded and contracting movement sequences, alongside an ambient soundscore to transform, hold and reveal the complex ecosystem of the self. The sounds are a symbiotic response to how bacteria grows and moves within the confines of the gallery. The artists use their mid-age female bodies inscribed by the lived experience of childbearing as metaphors to reflect on how their bodies are situated as hosts of non-human entities and reflect upon their corporeal capacites to ameliorate themselves. The female body here is a host and an environment constantly entangled in the production of Self and Other.


Sarah Shamash, Skulls & Oceans 2019 (2mins) 
This work contemplates inner cycles of birth, life, and death in a brief moment of escape from domestic life.

Director: Sarah Shamash
Country of Production: Canada


prOphecy sun, Domestic Cupboards 2017 (11:33mins)
The act of cooking involves many moments of play. This piece portrays the negotiations of a mother and her two young children in the act of a play in the familial kitchen.

Director: prOphecy sun
Country of Production: Canada


Freya Zinovieff, The Physical Impossibility of Prehistory in the Car of Someone Living 2020 (11:08 mins)
This work is a meditation on the colonial, gendered, and often violent relations between oil and capitalism, and the tender, monotonous, deep time of motherhood.

Director: Freya Zinovieff
Video editing: Angel Zinovieff
Country of Production: Canada/U.S
Language: English


Chapter 6: BLOOD 2020 (6mins)
Inspired by Clarice Lispector’s book Agua Viva and by the artistic and literary movements of Antropofagia and Realismo-Mágico, Reflections on a window glass is a video journal offering a glimpse into the possible dimensions of an artist's psyche.

Performed by Sai Di, Jelena Markovic, Guadalupe Martinez, and Dalia Shalabi
Narration by Guadalupe Martinez
Cinematography and editing by Luciana Freire D'Anunciaçao
Text excerpts from Clarice Lispector's book Agua Viva, 1973
Country of Production: Canada


Anna Zoria, Still and Moving 2021 (16mins)
The footage in Still and Moving is of my body during pregnancy, shot in the dark in my kitchen. In voice over, lines of poetry directed to my daughter are recited from twenty-three different poets, from Adrienne Rich and Forugh Farrokhzad to Emily Dickinson and TS Eliot. 

Language: English