On Demand

Trading the Future

by b.h. Yael
A video essay that questions the inevitability of apocalypse and its repercussions on environmental urgencies.
2008  ·  59m  ·  Canada
English
About the Film

TRADING THE FUTURE is a video essay that questions the inevitability of apocalypse and its repercussions on environmental urgencies.  Starting with a personal memory, the fear of the rapture, the video addresses the Christian narrative for the end of times, and draws connections to secular apocalypticism and our ready acceptance of a cataclysmic end. The video also challenges the philosophical and practical underpinnings of the symbolic of death, the desirability of the growth of the market place, and the politics of apocalypse, while proposing possible alternatives in the idea of natality, the productivity of biodiversity and the agency of everyday activism.

b.h. Yael traveled from Toronto to Patmos Island in Greece (where John wrote the book of Revelation), from Tofino, B.C. to New York, from England to Megiddo in northern Israel. Decidedly un-heroic, or non-messianic, TRADING THE FUTURE refuses to reproduce the apocalyptic images that we have been inundated with in media and movies.

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About the Director

b.h. Yael

b.h. Yael is a Toronto based filmmaker, video and installation artist. She is Professor of Integrated Media at OCAD University and past Assistant Dean and past Chair of Integrated Media in the Faculty of Art.

Yael is the recent recipient of a Chalmers Fellowship Award and a Toronto Arts Council grant to media artists. Her most recent work, Trading the Future recently won the ‘Audience Award’ at the Ecofilms 2009 festival in Rhodes, Greece, and has also received the ‘Best Humanitarian Observation – Media Matters’ award at the Rivers Edge International Film Festival in Kentucky, USA. Trading the Future is a video essay that questions the inevitability of apocalypse and its repercussions on environmental urgencies.

Yael’s work has exhibited nationally and internationally and has shown in various settings, from festivals to galleries to various educational venues. Her work has been purchased by several universities. Yael’s past film and video work has dealt with issues of identity, authority and family structures, while at the same time addressing the fragmentary nature of memory and belonging. More recent work focuses on activist initiatives, political fear, apocalypse and gender. The work most often involves non-linear and hybrid forms, including dramatized and fictional elements combined with first person narration, autobiographical and documentary perspectives.

 
Other films by b.h. Yael

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