29 Apr Film Factory’s 2025 residents!
Main Film would like to congratuate the three residents of The Film Factory : B. Brookbank, Raphaëlle Bergeron, and Alina Herta !
This program offers an opportunity for artists to take artistic risks in the development, exploration and experimentation of their practices as an art form. Through this residency, they will benefit from equipment, training and the proper environment to open new creative perspectives.
B. Brookbank
B. Brookbank is an artist from Nova Scotia, Canada, currently working in Montréal. Their practice considers the language and poetics of photography, through an interdisciplinary approach that includes moving image, installation, sculpture and writing. Recent solo exhibitions have taken place at the Leonard & Bina Ellen Gallery and Centre Clark (Montréal), Écart (Rouyn-Noranda), and the Anna (Halifax). Select group exhibitions took place at Patel Brown, (Montréal and Toronto), Centre Clark (Montréal), and Eyelevel Gallery (Halifax). Their practice has been supported through various grants and awards such as Concordia Faculty of Fine Arts Fellowship, Roloff Beny Photography Foundation, and the Canada Council for the Arts. Brookbank holds an MFA in Photography from Concordia University and a BFA in Photography from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University.
Residency project – Good Smoke on Skin
With Main Film I will be working on an experimental video project titled Good Smoke on Skin. It will depict poetic vignettes of desire and intimacy, through portraits, still lives, tension, and eroticism. By evading typical depictions of eroticism, searching gestures of intimacy in the home will aim to understand the limits of the erotic, giving license to space, animals, or objects to act as metaphorical links to desire. In some scenes the body will be present, layering itself with the symbolism within the film while building a gestural and experimental narrative. These vignettes will examine the physical and metaphorical aspects of desire – what resides within the body and what falls away.
Raphaëlle Bergeron
Raphaëlle Bergeron is a young filmmaker based in Montreal. After obtaining a certificate in feminist studies, in 2024 she completed a bachelor’s degree in cinema at the Université du Québec à Montréal, where she gained experience in documentary directing, art direction and production. Her work explores themes such as filiation, memory and mental health.
Residency project – La théorie des fluides
Inspired by true events, La théorie des fluides is an experimental short film following the story of a patient who develops a phobia of water following a heart transplant.As the story unfolds, painted and engraved analog images reveal the sudden death of the transplanted heart.
Alina Herţa
Alina Herţa (b. 1996, Hațeg) is (among other things) a visual artist whose practice navigates between photography, print and moving image. Trained in graphic design at UQÀM (2018), she is gradually orienting her work towards freer forms as she collaborates with Montreal’s independent scene. Inspired by alternative approaches to the image, Alina favors analog mediums and their accidental potential. She approaches the camera as both a tool for observation and a means of entering into dialogue with the unknown. In 2023, she made her first two short films, which have since been shown at various independent events in Culiacán (Auditorio Deutsche Bank, Jardín Botánico), Guadalajara (Taller Sociedad), Montevideo (Laboratorio FAC), and at festivals in Zurich (Videoex) and Montreal (Pop Montréal).
Residency project – Ailleurs
Ailleurs is an experimental short film project that explores how memory, belonging and displacement shape our relationship to inhabited spaces. Inspired by the floating homes of Newfoundland’s Resettlement Program – an initiative from the 1960s-1970s in which some families, rather than abandon their homes, chose to relocate them by sea – the project conjures up the image of an uprooted house, floating between here and elsewhere. From this image springs the desire to capture the home not as a mere physical place, but as a space constructed by memory, loss and desire. Through a collection of archives, stories and images of abandoned houses shot on Newfoundland territory in 16 mm, Elsewhere questions what remains of the home after leaving it.