Mosquitoes
(Upcoming)
Feature Documentary
Garden Reflexxx presents: Mosquitoes, a neo-intimate, chaos-infused road movie tracing the entangled lives of Evelyn Roth, a Canadian artist-turned-Maslin Beach icon, and Alison James, her whip-smart publican neighbour (and Jen’s mother). Evelyn’s tequila-fueled charisma meets Ali’s pragmatism on a spiraling journey through art, roadtrips, memory, and crumbling utopias. Think All The Beauty And The Bloodshed meets Kath and Kim with a hint of Grey Gardens.
From the prairies of Mundare, Evelyn’s birthplace crowned with the world’s largest kielbasa, to Hanapepe’s creative sanctuaries, Haida Gwaii’s historic potlatch, and Vancouver Art Gallery’s reverence for Evelyn’s groundbreaking archive, Mosquitoes explores the fraught intersections of ambition and burnout, documenting the often hilarious give and take of a bantering intergenerational friendship.
A practice of impressionist portraiture and mistakes-curious storytelling, Mosquitoes invites you into Evelyn’s flamboyant orbit and Ali’s fight for sanity. A super-natural figure from the Summer of Love whose oversized inflatables and woven recycled film stock sculptures have graced festivals and events for over forty years meets a foolhardy and chronically charismatic waitress traipsing across continents and archipeligos in search of a path into the future. Beneath the spectacle lies a tender, biting meditation on generational tensions and the communities we build to sustain creative lives.
Mood Ring with Sereima Adimate and Kiki Oner (2024)
Feature Film, 71 minutes
Mood Ring is a feature film by performance artist Sereima Adimate/Stelly G, Kiki Oner and Garden Reflexxx. The group examines female friendships, the idea of love letters, the challenge of unpacking heritage and the meaning of going home. In the ineffable shadow of taboo, Mood Ring is a radical sign of deliverance.
In 2021 the group started a writer's room brainstorming ideas of 'First Times'. It led them to Mood Ring, a community funded project based in/on Fiji. The footage features moments from the location reconnaissance Sereima went on in early 2022.
In a tangled visual poem that blends journal entries with travelogue, Kiki Oner and best friend Stelly G return to their island home Viti Lev. During this - their first trip together as adults - they make contact with a past that is unfamiliar to them yet shrouded in memories. What follows is a deeply felt trip that forces them to confront lives almost lived. There will be scenes of confronting pasts, and catastrophic futures.
Grape Steak (2023)
Feature Film, 100 minutes
Based on real gossip and violence. Vibrant colour invites us into a bat forest as someone waits, strips, for trade. A drummer is interviewed about a violent confrontation as he smashes his kit. A slim figure limps out of the darkness covered in blood to the sounds of New York's underground popstar Macy Rodman. A car bangs along an old dirt road and picks up stragglers, lost overnight who seem less affected than maybe they should be considering... Grape Steak is a wishfully ambient portal, a love-poem of trauma and humiliation set in Sydney, a slow comedy for a come-down, made resourcefully and communally over five years.