Solomon Nagler

The explosive story of how a stubborn band of independent filmmakers started a film co-operative that became the most highly respected and mythologized film centre in Canada. Tales outlines the tremendous importance and impact of Winnipeg on the national filmmaking scene. Packed with rare archival footage, dynamic film excerpts, and hilarious interviews, this documentary traces the history of the legendary Winnipeg Film Group. We hear candid behind the scenes stories that illuminate the storied rise of acclaimed filmmakers like John Paizs (Crime Wave), Guy Maddin (Tales From The Gimli Hospital, My Winnipeg) Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan (We’re Talking Vulva, Good Citizen, Betty Baker) and Caroline Monnet (Ikwe). Often mired in controversy, the Film Group has been acclaimed at film festivals around the world – attested to by several Toronto film luminaries in the film – for subversive, original filmmaking. This documentary continues that tradition of bold, exuberant work.

A survivor of the Holocaust and an impoverished aboriginal boy have just died. United in their displacement, they become caught up in the flux of transmigration. A nomadic fugue, they wander timelessly among the naked souls of Winnipeg's desolate North End.

Found memories decayed by the shock patterns of childhood trauma. This films is made mostly with footage found in the bin of an ophanage. The white progressivelly disolve within a darknest more and more dense. Faces progressivelly disolves within one another.

A work using the basic dramatic skeleton of a Greek tragedy while hanging rancid bits of contemporary meat on the bones. Fashioned in the school of prairie surrealism, revolving around the theme that "The gods don't know how to cook".

Hannah is about to have her third miscarriage. Working as a social worker at the Mission to Seafarers, she discovers a stowaway drifting aimlessly in the harbour, and decides to give the young man shelter in a decommissioned, cold war era nuclear fallout bunker that is being redesigned by her partner Antonia to serve as an archive dedicated to hagiographic graphology (the study of the saints through their handwriting). Hannah then retreats to a secluded cottage deep in the woods to confront pain and illumination alone.

Polish land taking in the Jewish dead. Beneath the streets of Warsaw, under the garden of the Embassy of the People’s Republic of China, are the lost writings of The Ash Kodesh (the holy fire), Rabbi Klonimus Kalmish Szapiro, a Chassidic master who was imprisoned in the Warsaw Ghetto. His lost aphorisms float through the hallowed trees and shadow architectures that sheltered jewish fugitives during the Shoah. In the forests, unmarked graves await commemoration; through glitch and balagan we are pulled into subterranean landscapes that emerge as fragmented archives of silence.

The everyday life of a couple at the twilight of their lives.

The everyday life of a couple at the twilight of their lives.

An intimate synthesis of sound and picture is created in Celluloid Sounds, a 16mm hand-processed film instillation. Crackles and pops carved onto hand-processed images float throughout the mysterious pseudo-multiplex, repetitiously mocking the environment and industry that is destined to abandon its beautiful image making creation...

Silent 16mm loop made for the situated cinema project at ArtSpace in Sydney, Australia. Composed of old footage from the directors' families.

Shot entirely in Warsaw, Poland, a polish post-communist love story set in the urban chaos of a farmers market in the city's centre.

Drawing on issues of memory, decay, palimpsest and the rubbing together of archive, fiction and situations, pilgrimage was constructed from found strips of 8mm amateur footage gleaned during a residency in Sydney, Australia. The original footage—a tourist’s voyeuristic, filmed impressions of a pilgrimage in a crowded urban space, where the faithful painfully stumble before the entrance of a temple—was reworked using an optical printer and other hand-made techniques.

"Like a world seen in sleep - a paradox of wakefulness and delirium, part lucid dream, part sunshine through sleep-heavy lids - the treated footage in Solomon Nagler's perhaps/We follows a cycle, with motifs of the ever-present twilight in a steel-blue Warsaw set against what could be (but probably isn't) archive footage, of an old woman asleep on a day-bed and an overgrown, forgotten Jewish Cemetery. Found sounds and field recordings join scratched records to create a soundtrack as plaintive as Nagler's manipulated film stock, a lone voice introducing and concluding the film: I float/ Above the world/ In my sleep/ In my dreams / And every time I dream, I loose half my body. A rumination on loss and memory, or memories half-forgotten, whilst perhaps/We isn't figurative, it offers and account of humanity, peopled by ghosts - undoubtedly the ghosts of the Holocaust: mournful yet never peevish, never mawkish." - Adam Pugh, Programmer Aurora Film Festival, Norwich England.

"Which ever word you speak you owe to destruction" Hand-processed sound/picture explores the intimate relationship between

Silent 16mm loop made for the situated cinema project at ArtSpace in Sydney, Australia. Filmed in an unlit abandoned music hall in Sackville, NB.

An experimental dark comedy about an aging prairie poet who tells the fantastical tale about the birth of her muse.

It's 1903, and Otto Weininger, Vienna's most infamous self-hating Jew has decided to kill himself in a room containing Beethoven's deathbed. He has just published his first book Sex and Character, and has yet to witness an acknowledgment of his self-assured genius. Haunted by the damning statements within his own book, he holds a gun to his head, and takes a leap towards the great unknown.

No synopsis available yet.

An upheaval - stitched and woven into abrupt 16mm light sculptures that reflect on besieged cities as they become ripped apart and reconfigured due to urban gentrification. The film material is sourced from fragments of rubble infrastructure dispersed and strewn about as older buildings are demolished and untold histories become erased. This film is an elegiac experimental map of the text and textures of cities in a state of flux.

B&W/Super-8/16mm

a poem on light with accompanying images

A short film that weaves together original and archival material to create an ethereal narrative texture, Black Saltwater Elegy intimately links the discordant threads of a popular history of dispossession (Africville) with the solitude of its protagonist's graveyard-shift fantasies. After opening with disquieting archival footage of the demolition of Africville, the film shifts to an austere observational portrait. A palatable sense of the duration of midnight work slowly shifts into subtle gestures that hint towards choreographed events. Eventually, a breech occurs as the protagonist fuses with an emergent dreamscape, where ruined landscapes and a resurrection of an extinct community intertwine. Using the protagonist's disembodied point-of-view, the audience floats above a reconstructed Africville, one forever present, nesting in a bed of saltwater fog.

Passages retrieved from the lublin genizah, a ruinous non-archive where the sacred is slowly being released from it's corporal form.

A film shot in three sequences, each sequence corresponds to one of the letters in the title of the film. The title M.O.Y. gets it's meaning only from the actions within the film narrative itself, and lacks any meaning outside the film.

A counter monument for five unmarked mass graves in the forests of eastern Poland. Phytograms gleaned and generated from flora on site - exposed and processed in situ. Research completed in partnership with the Zapomniane Foundation.