Port Lands
“audiences who want to encounter artists pushing the boundaries of film form can check out the experimental New Visions program. This short selection includes Zachary Finkelstein’s Port Lands, an innovative portrait of Toronto’s waterfront and the elements of industry that collide with nature.”
- Pat Mullen, POV online Posted July 21, 2021 [http://povmagazine.com/blog/view/ottawas-mirror-mountain-film-festival-returns-with-indie-spirit]
Port Lands presents Toronto’s industrial waterfront as a complex landscape in which past, present, and future geographies transition and converge. Using archival aerial photographs, microscopic videography and Lidar data mapping, this work documents how aquatic life has persisted despite intense industrialization.
Earlier phases of industrial development transformed the Port Lands into a human-built space for economic activity without regard for negative impacts on the existing environment. Evidence of this disregard persists in new so-called "revitalization" plans in which the water, land and its inhabitants are conceived not as a living ecosystem but primarily as data points to be optimized in a high-tech urban landscape.
This work merges three non-human-centered perspectives of the Port Lands with an original sound design by Mitchell Akiyama that evokes both the ecological and industrial presences of the area. As a result, we are asked to consider the Port Lands as an enduring ecology on the brink of uncertain future development.
This work was made on and with water from Niigaani-gichigami (Lake Ontario) gathered in Toronto’s port lands. This water is part of the traditional territory of the Huron-Wendat and the Haudenosaunee Confederacy.
The port lands is part of the treaty lands and territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation, who retain ownership to all waters within the ports lands vicinity and share this land with settlers.
As a settler on this land I share responsibility for protecting this water from further harm.
Screenings and Awards:
World Premiere: 10th Edition of ENCUENTRO PARA CINÉFAGOS Festival de Cine-Arte en la Frontera. (San Cristobal, VZ/Cucuta, CO. Sept. 2020) Awarded Best Video-art short.
Official Selection: XVII Festival Transterritorial de Cine Underground (Buenos Aires, AR. Dec. 2020)
Official Selection: Interface Festival (Greta Gallery. Zagreb, HR. Dec. 2020)
Official Selection: 15th Montréal Underground Film Festival (Montréal. CA. May 2021)
Official Selection: Mirror Mountain Film Festival (Ottawa, CA. July 2021)
Official Selection: Antimatter Media Art (Victoria, CA. October 2021)
Official Selection: 11th BINISAYA Film Festival (Cebu City, PH 2021)
Luminato Festival, Illuminating Ideas Program. Curator: Adam Barrett (Toronto, ON. June 2022)
Official Selection: Revolutions Per Minute Festival (Boston, MA. Oct. 2022)
We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and The Toronto Arts Council
