BNMI Co-Production Archives 'C'

CarnyLand

CarnyLand is a one hour documentary about the nomadic world of the contemporary carnival, (the travelling midway), as seen through the eyes of fellow nomads. The carnival is a place of wild contradictions and fast-paced dramas. CarnyLand will take the viewer backstage and introduce us to the carnies who keep this temporary festival of bright lights and sweeping rides on the road, day in day out, year after year.
Co-producers: Elia Kirby, Elisha Burrows, and Step Caruthers, (Vancouver, Canada) 2003
Format: Video documentary

Carousel Project: Little Wars

Little Wars: the Carousel Project is based on the history of carousels (‘little war’ in Italy). War games such as jousting tournaments later developed into carousels, which currently exist for us as rides perhaps in the future as virtual reality. In addition to horses, menagerie animals represented desirable characteristics needed in battle. All photographs were taken of actual rides. This multi-media installation includes the use of digital photography, animation, sculpture, light , movement, and original music by composer Dr. Irwin Swack. DVD authoring done at The Banff Centre.
Co-producer: Debra Swack (New York City, USA), 2002
Format: DVD

Casting a Shadow

Casting A Shadow is an international project with institutional and artistic components in the US, Canada, and Japan. This project is a dance experience which uses computer technology to place the award-winning (NEA Grant) Ririe-Woodbury Dance Co. (Salt Lake City) and the new media ensemble led by Phyllis Douglass: Bridge Dance Theatre (Los Angeles) in a realistic reconstruction of Native America (Anasazi) cave and cliff dwellings in the panorama of the American Southwest. The composer is Eric Lyon, a research fellow at the International Academy of Multimedia Arts & Sciences (Japan). The aerial painter Spelman Evans Downer (New York City) is the other principal artist in this new media production.
Co-producer: Nathaniel Bobbitt (Oregon, USA), 1998
Format: Dance Installation and Web Site

Christmas at Wapos Bay

This animated children’s short explores Christmas in the North. It won the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network Award at the Banff Television Festival in 2002.
Co-producer: Anand Ramayya (Nunavut, Canada), 2002
Format: Audio

Clickstreams

This Canadian/Dutch co-production offers viewers insights into the qualitative aspects of the mutual influences between technology and culture, with emphasis on international cyberspace gurus and techno-savvy artists from Amsterdam to Australia. It features cyber theorist Derrick de Kerckhove of The McLuan Institute. This series aired January, 1998 on the SPACE Channel.
Co-producer: Diana Platts (Toronto, Canada), 1997
Format: Video, Length: 30 minutes each (12 part series)

Computer Voices/Speaking Machines

This installation for the Walter Phillips Gallery is a complex investigation of community, space, and meaning and how meaning is constructed. The exhibition proposes the voice as a technology of emotional expression and memory, whether through utterance, text, breath or whispers.
Co-producers: Jocelyn Robert, Emile Morin (Quebec, Canada) and David Rokeby (Toronto, Canada), 2001
Format: Installation

Compwriting: A Theory for Virtual Typewriters

An interactive web site for de-automatized text and thought, Compwriting provides for a fundamental area of human evolution: the ability to write. Compwriting tools are linguistic algorithms that re-order letters, words, even languages, producing neo-meaning, in a process that involves de-scripting and re-scripting methodologies. The objective is to develop an interactive web site and populate it with virtual writing machines, the so-called virtual typewriters, that can provide for mathematical operations with textual language. The purported strategy is to generate, create or recreate words, phrases and texts introducing neo-meaning and thus stimulate new thinking.
Co-producer: Artur Matuck (Brazil), 1998
Format: Web Site

Construction Project

Construction Project is a three-phase project beginning with a web site that leads to a CD-ROM and culminates in a multimedia installation. For the first phase, Lingua Franca, Web site visitors must navigate their way through a house under construction. The visitor responds to a series of questions referring to personal experience, reminiscences, memories of homes, houses, rooms they have lived in, grew up in or spaces/houses/rooms imagined and from dreams. Random rollovers on inset maps produce both image and sound details. Narratives emerge only to be interrupted as the physical characteristics of the walls, doorways, windows and closets, shift. The basic structure is unfixed and ever evolving.
Co-producer: Susan Barnet (California, USA), 2001
Format: Web Site

Conversations with Angels

Conversations with Angels is a VRML 2.0 and Java-based multi-user web project which consists of 3D worlds where several users are able to navigate via their own work stations. The worlds are interactive: the user is able to trigger sound effects, animations, and video clips by clicking the mouse and chatting with the chat programs that represent the avatars inhabiting the world. These chat programs and 3D worlds make reference to real experiences, environments shared by real people – deliberately seeking politically codified yet imaginary symbolism, representing cultural minorities, sex-obsessed maniacs, mass murderers, redneck fundamentalists, etc. Multi-user capability enables interaction between several simultaneous users via their own avatar representation and chat windows or audio channels.
Co-producers: Andy Best and Merja Puustinen (Finland), 1998
Format: Web Site

A Cowboy’s Fairytale

This half hour film provides visibility and voice to the issue of discrimination of gay youth by their age group peers. Greater awareness will create a dialogue amongst all youth to discuss not only this issue, but address the tolerance of diversity within their schools, (rural and urban), and their communities as a whole. Greater awareness will lead to lower rates of discrimination and fewer victims. As experienced by the main character, Prince, the film also touches on issues of alienation, sexual identity and the estrangement from one’s own family.
Co-producer: Aaron Langvand (Edmonton, Canada), 2002
Format: Video, Length: 30 minutes

Cruel Courage

This one-hour documentary opens in New York City on September 11th, 2001. After witnessing the destruction of ground zero, a Canadian filmmaker, Gray Miles, realizes that life in the West has irrevocably changed. A week later he is in Colombia, a country that has been living in ‘terror’ for 39 years. What happens to a place in which terrorism and fear are woven tightly into the fabric of daily life? Joined by advisor, stepbrother and co-producer Nathan Hendrie, Miles embarks on a search for answers from the Colombian people. As the film progresses it becomes clear there are two basic responses: accept terror, or work to end it. Although in Colombia the cycle of violence ultimately continues, this film is a story of hope and adaptation because of the resilience of the main characters. But hope itself is cruel. As Gabriel García Marquez has written, the adaptability of Colombians may be the cruelest kind of courage, because it enables Colombians to carry on no matter how terrible the circumstances.
Co-producer: Gray Miles, (Harrington, USA), 2004
Format: Video, Length: 52 minutes

The Cucumber Incident

The Cucumber Incident is a feature length documentary that chronicles a family’s struggle for justice after they learn that one of their youngest, a 5-year-old girl, is being sexually molested by her stepfather. Increasingly frustrated by the inaction of Children’s Services, the child’s maternal grandmother, Mary Franks, feels forced to intervene. She decides that the best way to stop the abuse is to make sure he leaves town. Mary is joined by her sister-in-law and daughters in an odd and impassioned act of retribution against the molester, an act that ironically results in charges of rape and kidnapping against the women of this matriarchal posse. Unintended consequences abound as the family is cast into a dizzying maze of media sensationalism and legal machination. And what is revealed, in poignant and often painful detail, is a graphic illustration of the schism in our culture between, on the one hand, codified law that doesn’t seem to safeguard the innocent and, on the other, instinctual desires to protect children by any means necessary. The Cucumber Incident follows the three women’s moving journey, which begins when they cross the line of the law and continues over the next three years as they deal with the shocking aftermath of their crime.
Co-producer: Bonita Makuch and Melodie Calvert
(Fire Ant Films, Los Angeles, USA), 2001
Format: Video, Length: 76 minutes

Cyber Kawachi

Cyber Kawachi gives rhythm to sounds and images in dynamic sequences, expressing the hidden power of the Kawachi suburbs with airplanes flying over; darkened by the smoke of old factories and highways and distorted by serial high-tech slums.
Co-producer: Emmanuelle Loubet (Osaka, Japan), 1997
Format: CD-ROM

CyberPowWow 2K

CyberPowWow 2K, is the next evolution of the project CyberPowWow. Ten artists and writers were invited to create new artwork and texts that will be added to the CyberPowWow Palace and/ or Web site. In a proactive effort to de-ghettoize themselves, for the first time, the group has invited non-Native artists to participate. They have asked these artists to explore that place, both real and dreamed, where Native meets non-Native. Ten participating artists and writers were brought together to work both individually and collectively on their digital pieces and “install” them in the virtual gallery. They are:
• Trevor Van Weeren, digital artist from Darwin, Australia.
• Rea, Australian Aboriginal digital artist living in Sydney.
• Jason Lewis, Cherokee poet and software programmer living in San Francisco.
• Ahasiw Maskegon-Iskwew, Cree media-
integrated performance and New Media artist living in Winnipeg.
• Sheila Urbanoski, video, installation and New Media artist, currently based in London.
• Travis Neel, Kwakiutl carver, Web designer and IT consultant living in Vancouver.
• Marilyn Burgess, Canadian filmmaker, writer and curator, living in Quebec.
• Michelle Nahanee, Squamish artist working in print communications, Web design and digital video, living in Vancouver.
• Skawennati Tricia Fragnito, Mohawk/Italian artist and curator, living in San Francisco
• Archer Pechawis, Plains Cree performance and New Media artist, based in Vancouver.

The CyberPowWow palace and web site, make up the “cyber” component of the project. The Palace is a graphical chat program that allows visitors to view images (such as digital or digitized artwork), read text, and “talk” with other visitors, represented by “avatars,” in real time. It is open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year to anyone with Internet access.
Co-producers: Skawennati Tricia Fragnito (San Francisco, USA), Archer Pechawis (Vancouver, Canada), 2001
Format: Palace/Web Site