a review

I find it very hard to write nice things about my own work. It is not that I think what I make is bad. More that I'm never confident that I ever finish the editing stage. That makes it hard for me to write about the short films I've made.

Then just the other week, a very good friend of mine was in town and was very excited about my stuff. She started by saying, "Your films make me uncomfortable..." and then I smiled... because it was just the right thing to say. We've known each other for a very long time now, and she is one of the best photographers I know. I also know that she has never bullshitted me about anything.

Anyway, because it took me a week or more to write the copy for my website, I thought her words would have more value, since I've noticed that people can claim just about anything on the internet.

Here it is:

Weston has a wonderful sensitivity to those moments often overlooked or dismissed as inconsequential by storytellers as banal within contemporary renditions of ‘quintessentially Canadian’ politically or culturally charged moments. He masterfully conveys a compelling story of the individual's struggle with herself within her environment by generating a paralleling story alongside the overt theme of each short film that inevitably becomes about the viewer.

Charting the trials and tribulations of Carrie in French Panic, Weston brings the experience of an Albertan English speaker taking French classes in Montreal into the realm of subconscious discomfort through association for the viewer. By consciously pausing in moments of silence, or of self-reflection on the part of the subject, Weston craftily prolongs the ‘invasion of privacy’ one feels while witnessing the peripheral moments of weighty words spoken about the main topic by the subject. This sets up a parallel experience of discomfort that transcends through the greater issue at hand through the subject’s words, body language, and silence¸ directly into the lap of the viewer. The border between subject and viewer is seemingly removed by this inherent process of self-reflection and association that is generated by the act of watching.

In Levi¸ we are exposed to a dramatic reality- one of a Canadian Hasidic Jew who has come a point of departure from his faith and (as a consequence) his way of life and family. The viewer is immediately able to connect with Levi through the feeling of familiarity in what is likely to be unfamiliar terrain. Weston connects us to his subjects, and he therefore connects Canadians to Canadians, strangers to strangers, and ultimately, unfamiliar to familiar which in retrospect is brilliant.

-Kat Thomson, October 9, 2010

Thanks Kat. I know I could never have written that.