Juli Saragosa

A daring documentary delving into the experiences of a Ukrainian forced labourer in Germany during World War II, exploring themes of love, loss, and profound longing. When the filmmaker’s grandmother was 19, she was taken from Soviet Ukraine to Germany to work on a Bavarian farm under National Socialism. She had the luck and perseverance to survive the hardships of the forced famine in her homeland and forced labour in the new one. The stories of her everyday life – learning how to milk a cow, and falling in love – are interspersed with three generations of reflections on politics, longing, feelings of displacement and loss. Hand-processed black & white film, colour film, photographs and official documents create a montage of different perspectives. The hand-touch aesthetic combines with the acousmatic effect of disembodied voices, in this deeply intimate portrait obscured by memory loss, mistranslation, fear and trauma.

A long process of experimentation with a variety of different filmmaking techniques while examining an evolving queer identity. The film shows an emergence of the Pink Fairy. Part femme, part tomboy, part fairy, the characters come together to subvert the idea of a fixed identity. Luminescent imagery is imprinted by hand using hand-processed colour footage, optically printing Super 8 to 16mm, 16mm to 16mm, negative to positive, video to film, and repeating motifs, to explore the intricacies of the celluloid medium. Audio emotes through random manipulations in a Brion Gysin-like cut-up technique.

2005 They Dance Alone (5mins, 16mm, personal-poetic)

A Super-8 short-film adaptation of S.E. Hinton's "The Outsiders" styled as a music video/silent-film -- director Juli Saragosa has a different take on greaser masculinity than did Francis Ford Coppola.

Amoré (1min, 16mm film loop, experimental installation) In 2005, Amoré won the Best Canadian Film award at Toronto’s International One-minute Film Festival and in 2011, it won the Jury Prize for Experimental Film at the Toronto Underground Film Festival.

This Super 8 film was first presented as part of a ritual performance where Saragosa is naked and pulls a white piece of fabric out of her "yoni", pinning it up and projecting the film onto it in reverse, while speaking the words on the film. The performance was part of a collective recreation of Carolee Schneemann’s ‘Interior Scroll.’

A hand-made film that explores a 21st-century ritual celebration - Toronto's Gay Pride Parade (2000). The contrast between the images' archival quality with the 90's dance music makes us wonder whether we are watching an event of some forgotten culture, or something urban and modern.