![Laika Laika film image, director Deborah Stratman](https://images.viff.org/uploads/2022/08/Laika.jpg?resize=600%2C337&gravity)
Canadian Premiere
Some forms we can only know by their shadow. Laika is an homage to the spirits of space test dogs, or any being we use in the name of progress.
USA
2022
No Dialogue
Featured in:
![Parasite Family Parasite Family film image, director Prapat Jiwarangsan](https://images.viff.org/uploads/2022/08/ParasiteFamily.jpg?resize=16%2C10&gravity)
MODES 2
Looking closer at archival images and stories from the past, these artists re-examine and re-create to establish history anew. A daring mix of approaches that excavate new ways of seeing old perspectives.
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Sugarcane
"Deeply impactful", Sugarcane is an important contribution to the ongoing process of Truth & Reconciliation in this country, a compassionate, sensitive account of the investigation into residential school abuse at Williams Lake, BC.
Soundtrack to a Coup D’Etat
In January 1961, seven months after Congolese independence, Patrice Lumumba is assassinated. In excavating the history of this political murder, this essay-film traces the complex and unlikely intersections of American jazz and Cold War geopolitics.
Universal Language
In a wintery, Farsi-speaking city that’s equal measures Winnipeg and Tehran, storylines entangle and the concepts of space, time, and identity grow increasingly opaque. Inventive and absurd, Rankin's poetic fable reminds us that Winnipeg is a wonderland. Rated: G
Every Little Thing
If you thought Flow was an emotional rollercoaster, wait til you meet Cactus and Wasabi, baby hummingbirds fighting for their lives under the loving care of hummingbird-whisperer Terry Masear, an Angelino who makes it her mission to nurse injured birds.
Arthur Erickson: Beauty Between the Lines
This new documentary offers the most complete account so far of the life and work of Canada's greatest architect, the man responsible for several of the finest buildings in Vancouver -- including the Museum of Anthropology and the SFU Campus.
Credits
Cinematography
Deborah Stratman
Editor
Deborah Stratman
Original Music
Olivia Block
Director
![Deborah Stratman Deborah Stratman headshot, Laika director](https://images.viff.org/uploads/2022/08/DeborahStratman.jpg?fit=50%2C40)
Deborah Stratman
Artist and filmmaker Deborah Stratman makes films and artworks that investigate power, control, and belief by considering how places, ideas, and society are intertwined. Recent projects have addressed freedom, exodus, augury, surveillance, comets, raptors, orthoptera, sinkholes, levitation, sisterhood, and faith. She teaches at the University of Illinois in Chicago.
Filmography: The BLVD (1999); O’er the Land (2009); The Illinois Parables (2016)