Made by Hand: Thirty-one Years of Film-Farmmaking

Los Angeles Filmforum and T.A.P.E. present

Made by Hand: Thirty-one Years of Film-Farmmaking

Saturday October 18, 2025, 8:00 pm

At Whammy!, 2514 Sunset Blvd. Los Angeles, CA 90026
Entrance in rear off Rampart!

In person: Philip Hoffman, Annapurna Kumar

Tickets: $12 General Admission, $11 T.A.P.E. Members, free for Filmforum members

https://www.whammyanalog.com/events/made-by-hand-thirty-one-years-of-film-farmmaking-pres-by-la-filmforum-and-tape

NOTE THE CHANGE IN DAY AND LOCATION!

Join LA Filmforum and TAPE Los Angeles as we all celebrate Film Farm coming through Los Angeles to celebrate their 31st year of existence and integral contribution to the experimental film world!

‍For 31 years, between the greenery and the rivers near Mount Forest (Ontario, Canada), a unique retreat for filmmakers takes place at the Film Farm, conducted by Philip Hoffman and a dedicated staff of innovative film artists (Rob Butterworth, Christine Harrison, Deirdre Logue, Scott Miller Berry and Terra Jean Long). Founded in 1994 as the Independent Imaging Retreat, Film Farm is an artist-driven, intensive, week-long analogue filmmaking workshop and is a central part of Canada’s experimental film scene. The Film Farm has initiated and enhanced the work of local, national and international filmmakers and has expanded the traditions of experimental filmmaking in Canada and beyond. The workshop concentrates on hand-processing of 16mm film, most recently (since 2008) working with cafenol and various botanical developing processes. Works of the Film Farm are influenced by the methodology of Process Cinema, developed over many years through Hoffman’s own filmmaking and the Process Cinema course he has taught since 2007 at York University. In Process Cinema, artists replace the usual protocol of the script (planning), with a direct engagement with the world through the hand-cranked Bolex camera and hand-made analogue filmmaking processes.

The first part of the program presents earlier works using methods of hand -processing celluloid in buckets, utilizing conventional photo chemistry, tinting with dyes and using photo and filmmaking techniques like solarisation, in-camera superimposition, pixilation, and optical printing for expression.

The later films in the program reflects ecologically friendly processing practices, using local flowers and plants to develop and tint the films. As well in the second part of the program, Film Farm-Saugeen First Nation collaboration is represented. The Saugeen Takes on Film project has been conceptionalised by Adrian Kahgee, Debbie Ebanks Schlums and Phil Hoffman since 2018, in conjunction with artists, storytellers, knowledge keepers and youth from the Saugeen community. As well the program includes two films, by Hoffman, both shot and edited at the Film Farm: Kokoro is for Heart (1999) made in collaboration with Japanese-Canadian poet Gerry Shikatani and a recent film by Hoffman and Isiah Medina, partially hand-processed with oregano, endings (2024), which will close out the program.

At Film Farm, participants are asked not to come with an idea; that they will find it during their stay. Having now produced almost 300 participants (of whom almost two-thirds are women) and over 100 completed works, the Film Farm has helped sustain a spirit of discovery and risk in contemporary experimental filmmaking. For many of the participants of Film Farm, the workshop has been a catalyst as they embarked on a practice of analogue artist-filmmaking.

Run time: 64:20

Philip Hoffman is a Canadian experimental who’s recent work explores plant processing of motion picture film (`vulture', `Deep 1’, `endings’ and `Flowers #3 Kissed by the Sun'). He is also the founder and artistic director of the Film Farm, a hand-made filmmaking workshop in Southern Ontario, which has been in existence for 31 years.

Annapurna Kumar is a Southern California artist who makes animated films and soft sculpture. Her practice, though often abstract and fast-paced, carries soft-footed political messages on the themes of environmentalism, military divestment, and liberation.

Gathering (a sketch)

By Janis Cole (Canada)

2004, 16mm, silent, 1:20 min. Los Angeles premiere!

The 2004 Film Farm bolex gathering: Barbara Sternberg, Sarolta Jane Cump, Tim Schwab, Scott Berry, Isabelle Babici, Pamila Matharu, Sonja Linden, Sean Karimi, Amanda Dawn Christie, Scott Puccio and Eve Heller.

Self Portrait #1

By Michèle Pearson Clarke

2016, 2:30 min. Los Angeles premiere

One roll of film, a subject and a landscape.

Minus

By Chris Chong (Malaysia/Canada)

1999, 16mm to HDV, sound, 3 min.

Minus is a hand-processed, unedited stream of movements. After subtracting most of what took place before the camera, what is left is remnants of light and rhythm, traces of a body in motion. This was Chong's first 16mm film, and demonstrates the kinds of rich results that can be obtained from simple, highly restricted means and techniques. -Chris Gehman, "The Independent Imaging Retreat", The Fabulous Festival of Fringe Film (Program Notes 2004).

Scratch

1999, 16mm, optical sound, 3 min.

By Deirdre Logue (Canada)

Deirdre Logue’s short and deceptively simple film, “Scratch” conveys the filmmaker’s physical insertion into nature only this time the experience is not sensual release, rather it is a sadomasochistic and painful journey.  We read “My path is deliberately difficult”. Facing the camera, she puts thistles down her underpants, and pulls them out again. The sounds of breaking glass as well as the crackle of film splices are almost the only sounds heard in this mostly silent film. Intercut are found footage images from an instructional film, we see a bed being automatically made and unmade, glass breaking and plates smashed. This film is sharp and painful. Her body is treated like a piece of emulsion--processed, manipulated, scratched, cut to fit.  -Janine Marchessault  `Women, Nature and Chemistry: Hand-Processed Films from The Independent Imaging Workshop’ , Lux: A Decade of Artists’ Film, Pleasure Dome/YYZBooks 2006

A Day in the Shint

By Clint Enns (Canada)

2013, 16mm, silent, 1:15

A film made at the 2013 Film Farm using the 2009 shint (a very good year).

The Shape of the Gaze

By Maïa Cybelle Carpenter (USA)

2000, 16mm, silent, 7 min.

Optically printed, hand processed and painted: the film process is manipulated to disrupt viewing expectations on a textual and aesthetic level. This repositions the subject and discourse of gender ambiguity available in the gaze. By shifting the discourse of the gaze, the film implicates viewers in the gazes operating between the filmmaker and her self-identified lesbian butch subjects. Cast: Denise Conca, Susan Ford, Deirdre Logue, Karyn Sandlos, and Gretchen M. Till.

We Are Going Home

By Jennifer Reeves (USA)

1998, 16mm, sound, 9:30 min.

We Are Going Home is a gorgeous surrealistic film that has all of the characteristics of the trance film and more. It is structured around a dream sequence that has no real beginning or end. The film is in no doubt a nod to the Surrealists as these highly processed landscapes belong to the unconscious. -Janine Marchessault  `Women, Nature and Chemistry: Hand-Processed Films from The Independent Imaging Workshop’, Lux: A Decade of Artists’ Film, Pleasure Dome/YYZBooks 2006

Film-Landscape-People

By Marcia Connolly and Angela Joosse (Canada)

2008, 16mm, sound, 3:30 min. Los Angeles premiere!

An Exquisite Corpse made in three parts during the 2008 Film Farm, with assistance from the in-camera rewind function of the Bolex camera, a matt box, and chance.

Kokoro is for Heart

By Philip Hoffman (Camera, Optical Printing and Editing)

1999, 16mm optical printed, sound, 7 min. Los Angeles premiere!

Sound Composition and Performance: Gerry Shikatani

“Kokoro is for Heart” features poet Gerry Shikatani and explores the relationships surrounding language, image and sound, set to the backdrop of a gravel pit down the road from the Film Farm.

“…introducing a glitch into the material that can either be rejected as a mistake or accepted as part of the process. As Hoffman describes: When I got the footage back from the lab I was disappointed because of the periodic flipping of the image. I soon realised that the malfunctioning camera rendered the filmed-nature, unnatural…what is nature? What is natural?” –Kim Knowles, Experimental Film and Photochemical Practices, 2020

Your New Pig is Down the Road

By Helen Hill (USA/Canada)

1999, 16mm to digital, silent, 4:45 min.

The film is a cinematic love letter, a gift in film that Helen Hill gave to her husband Paul Gailiunas on their 2nd wedding anniversary.

 “ The playful short film combines pixilation, tinting and toning (orange and blue), a countdown with images of farm animals, friends dancing like marionettes, vast fields of daisies, a statue of St. Francis (patron saint to animals), and two piglets.” – Janine Marchessault, Process Cinema: Handmade Film in the Digital Age, McGill-Queens 2019.

 A cinematic love letter to her husband Paul which Helen filmed during a summer in Ontario at Phil Hoffman’s Film Farm (a filmmaking workshop where she learned to hand process her own films). Helen beckons Paul to follow her down the road where Paul’s new pig waits. The film features their much loved daisies, their much respected Saint Francis, and their baby pig Daisy. After they were married, Paul and Helen kept a pot bellied pig in New Orleans which they named Rosie. —Harvard Film Archive

Dandelion

By Karel Doing (Netherlands/U.K.)

2018, 16mm to HDV, silent, 2:15 min. Los Angeles premiere!

A couple of years ago I have discovered new possibilities for the creation of images on film-emulsion by using the internal chemistry of plants. This technique is a combination of photograms and chemigrams and because of the lack of an accurate term I have named this method 'phytogram'. I have worked with this idea in my back garden, using available plants and weeds. Dandelions turned out yield particularly good results. This short film is entirely dedicated to the power and beauty of this humble plant. –Karel Doing

Everything is Right Here

By Adrian Kahgee (Saugeen Nation/Canada)

2021, 16mm to HDV sound, 5:45 min. Los Angeles premiere!

Kahgee, from Saugeen First Nation territory, develops her film with dandelions (a colonial plant) and trilliums (indigenous to the Saugeen territory) to consider their histories (how they came to be on the land) and their medicinal properties. At the center of my metaphorical bag writes Kahgee, is cultural knowledge that is deeply woven into the land. Plants are also connected to understanding the world in terms of change, transformation, survival and interconnectedness. –Janine Marchessault & Philip Hoffman, “Blooming Harmonics: Feminist Ecologies of Process Cinema”, Expanded Nature, Lightcone, 2022.

Flying Geese;

Flying Geese

By Adrian Kahgee (Saugeen Nation/Canada)

2022, 16mm to HDV, sound, 2:45 min. Los Angeles premiere!

Flying Geese explores the intersections of communities, as an Anishnaabekwe of Saugeen First Nation and a descendant of freedom seekers, who settled in some of the earliest Black settlements with Saugeen Ojibway Nation’s traditional territory. The film was hand-developed using a sweet pea and bladder campion and includes sections of contact printing through DIY methods.

Something to Treasure

By Annapurna Kumar (USA)

2018, 16mm to HDV, sound, 2:15 min.

A playful and inventive animation film that utilizes botanical hand-processing techniques in conjunction with found footage, to explore consumer desires and nightmares.

endings

By Philip Hoffman and Isiah Medina

2024, 16mm Color Reversal and B&W Flower-Processed to HDV, silent & sound, 9:30 min.

Los Angeles premiere!

Sound: Hoffman & Medina, Clint Enns, Luca Santilli and Kennedy

`Trees, farm fields with animal livestock, ponds and plants, and natural artifacts disappear in the flicker effect of landscape compositions where sweeping branches carve moving structures into the viewer’s memory, and the transformations of living image threads remind us of the inexhaustible visual exuberance of meadows and grain.’ - Fascinations, Jihlava Film Festival.