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:
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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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.
The Seed of the Sacred Fig
A tense mystery and an act of radical protest, this film tells the story of an Iranian lawyer who’s lost his handgun and knows someone in his family took it. With every moment, his wife and daughters grow more afraid of him–yet none of them will confess…
To Kill a Mockingbird
Robert Mulligan's beloved film adaptation of Harper Lee's novel is the tale of a white lawyer, Atticus Finch, defending an innocent black man accused of rape in a small southern town in the 1930s. As selected by VIFF Premium member Margot Pratt.
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.
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
Credits
Cinematography
Deborah Stratman
Editor
Deborah Stratman
Original Music
Olivia Block
Director
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)