Film Features
The North Was Our Canaan which aided slaves from America to find a safe haven. The film interview descendants of community which was established through action rooted in abolitionist activities and the anti-slavery movement.
The North was Our Canaan is an SSHRC funded short documentary enumerating the historical struggles of anti-slavery and civil rights advocates in an era where slavery, segregation and discrimination were the norms. Sandwich town in Windsor, ON, Canada is one of those historical places where refugees escaping from slavery in America found a safe house. We navigate through the historical landmarks of this town, listen to the stories of these brave souls through the very mouths of this Black community who still celebrates, rejoice and takes pride in the bravery, struggle and the history that led to a better society for people of colour in North America.
Directed by Anushray Singh
Produced by Irene Moore Davis and Heidi LM Jacobs
Sound by Sikandar Saleem
Edited by Brandon Bastien and Anushray Singh
Production Assistant Prasanna Marathan
Special Thanks
The Historical Sandwich FIRST Baptist Church
Kimberly Simmons
Lana Talbot
Charlotte Watkins and the Watkins Family
Teajai Travis
Ghar Kaha Hai is the core thesis question for Anushray Singh's MFA thesis in Film & Media Arts at the School of Creative Arts at the University of Windsor.
This is the first of three visual poem series; all of them are responses to this one question. This visual poem explores the transient nature of home. A meta narrative of diasporic indiviudals living in the West or even different faraway land look back at their homelands through nostalgia, memory and ambivalence. The feeling of homelessness, and here-ness and there-ness make the basic definition of home rather insufficient. The visual poem is a diasporic response through the poetic juxtaposition of visual-sound.
Part of a three-part response to Anushray Singh's MFA Film & Media Art Thesis at the University of Windsor, Home Nowhere is the inner rift often faced by diasporic -- the people re-located to different lands from the ones they grew up in. There is this feeling no-whereness, hereness & thereness, in-betweenness, & its the personal poetics, that the filmmaker is interested in exploring.
Door Kahi is a part of the MFA Thesis intermedia project of Anushray Singh (University of Windsor). It is a visual poem exploring the 'nostalgia', 'here-ness and there-ness' of the diasporic reminiscing about home. It's a poetic response to the faraway land; an ode to the home that once was; a deep yearning experienced by diasporic re-located to a different land and home, yet the visuality, distinct soundscape and cultural connection renders them as inhabitors of two worlds, not home here and not home there.
A short video with nine multi-channel videos, where eight of them playing scenes from India, and one in the core playing scenes from Canada. This short video touches upon themes of MFA Film & Media Candidate Anushray Singh's work which explores the idea of occupying different spaces, cultures and landscapes. He tries to explore this postcolonial socio-linguistic theory of the third space which is attributed to the popular cultural theorist Homi K. Bhabha to understand the hybridity and multicultural spaces of someones who ancestrally say Indian and currently resides in a Western space. This video is produced for the University of Windsor's Humanities Research Groups Annual Why Humanities? the contest, and through this, Anushray tries to answer why humanities matter to him!
‘I am a’ is a visual poem that touches upon its creator’s proclivity in understanding the utter meaninglessness and the existentialism that borne out of it. This poem tries to include the poignant sceneries of the world around us by using hyper-exaggerated colour corrections to try to explain the poet’s utter dismay of the meaning of main, sheer mortality of men and the paradoxical joy of suffering that has been discussed in the philosophies of modern existentialists such as Neitschze and Sartre. I am a is an ode to existentialism of human condition and the optimism we can derive through looking inward, and understanding our flesh and bone existence and the sheer mortality of your fibre. Here is the written transcript of the poem: Deconstruct me, I am a human. Devour me, I am a mortal. Destroy me, I am flesh and bones. Knitting my pain away, Gnawing my pain away, I sway, I sway, I sway. Lingering through this world, The pain of existence, The pain of meaninglessness, The joy of pain. Deconstruct me, I am an abstraction Devour me, I am restless Destroy me, I am broken. Walking away, Watching away, Slithering away, I ache, I ache for home, I ache for a home that never was. The world, and the men of it, gnawing, Suffering, Resisting Hence existing Out of brevity, Out of context, I ramble, I bamble, Frail being of emotions, Flesh and bones, Bukowski and shakespeare, Nietzsche and Sartre, A drunkard and a teetotaler Vices and virtues, All aching away, All existing Divine me, I am a human Define me, I am a human Decorate me, I am a human Love me, I am a………...
"Tree, flowers, rivers, small animals...........all here for us", the film is an attempt to place the viewer in a position to see the materiality of our human experience. The visual poem aids the filmmaker's original poem by combining elements of visuals and sounds.
The multi-channel video format is an attempt to portray a different human perception of the world around them, and this is done through colour curves and corrector to change the composition of the original copy. Through the creation of a photoreal environment, combined with poetry narration that may or may not follow the conventions of alliteration. The film is an effort grounded to the visual perception of beauty around us that is often lost on a lot of us due to our fixation to what people think about us over what we think about ourselves.
Tantamount is a short experimental documentary that juxtaposes two different landscapes, namely India and Canada. As an Indian living in Canada, my mind tries to coalesce, juxtapose and try to map familiarity in these different landscapes. This short documentary tries double exposure in order to juxtapose similarities in human nature and visible differences owing to geographical and cultural differences.
It is a short documentary complemented by jazz music to highlight the bizarre, peculiar, fun and chaotic side of life in India's capital Delhi. It plays out in a montage style taking its inspiration from Woody Allen's opening shots that are an analysis and tribute to the city that his film is based on; for example the opening sequence in Midnight in Paris showcasing normal life in the city of love.
It's a short film (under 2-minutes) made for DW Travel Video competition. I took a trip to Rajasthan in 2016, and for me, it appeared as this mirage in the middle of the desert. A cultural explosion and a hauntingly historical beauty were the remnants of this trip for me.
Why Humanities is a visual poem by Anushray Singh which is produced for the Humanities Research Group's Why Humanities? competition. This film is an experiment is narrating the deep feeling its creator espouses about the importance of humanities, art and fulfillment in this world that is built on flimsy foundations of greed, power and money.
This video mapping project has been produced for the Studio Production 2 course in accordance of the MFA Film and Media Arts program in the University of Windsor. The whole premise is to present a psychedelic experience by creating a Kaleidoscopic rendition of footages that I shot in the colourful state of Rajasthan in India.
Nihilism is a belief that nothing in this world has real meaning and life is all but meaningless. This visual poem is about the positive outlook of nihilistic belief system and how even life without meaning can be interpreted as optimistically.
This visual poem is produced for the 4th Annual Heaven on Earth Video Contest. The visual poem is a representation of how heaven on Earth is relative in nature. If you have a positive attitude, you can certainly find heaven in little things in life but on the other hand a negative or a dark outlook would make heaven on Earth seem like an utopian fable.
In this video essay, we analyse Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris (2011) starring Owen Wilson as the protagonist who is a passionate admirer of the city of Paris. Through his eyes, we see a city that holds the glories of the past where prominent artists of all time such as Picasso, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dali and many other lived, worked, and partied.
It is a short film which in a nutshell is about the trials and tribulation everyone faces on a working Monday morning. The film focuses on her protagonist as she is struggling with inner conflicts and feeling the Monday blues. The protagonist of the film thinks out loud as her daily grind of Monday plays on.