Bill Brown and Thomas Comerford are filmmakers who share a similar preoccupation with how place is perceived. Brown calls himself a "landscape essayist" — a perfect description. His "Buffalo Common" visits touchingly shabby North Dakota towns where outlying farmland is dotted with silos containing fully armed nuclear ICBMs; the juxtaposition is as striking as Brown’s robust 16mm chiaroscuro. In "Confederation Park," the innovative use of speed variation and time-lapse enlivens an exploration of the different natures of Canadian cities. In each film, Brown’s reedy voice describes scenes of simple beauty: twin cities huddling together against the bitter Midwestern cold; people gingerly feeling their way through pitch-dark, ice-glazed Montreal streets, a city rendered in Braille.

If Brown’s works are expansive, Comerford’s are confined. Using a pinhole camera, he lingers for long minutes on small scenes — Venetian blinds, a wavering clothesline — where the slightest breeze or shift of light imbues mundane details with new life. The Latin intertitles of "ILLA CAMERA OBSCVRA" may smack of pretension, but Comerford does make the corner of a window in a dark room strangely compelling. In "Départ" (a sly homage to Louis Lumière’s L’arrivée d’un train à la Ciota), a mellifluous French voice discourses over a warmly pulsating image of a train at a station. Comerford’s bleary photographic eye, evoking the delicate obfuscation of a Gerhard Richter painting, gives profundity to the prosaic. Both filmmakers craft little epiphanies, films that make Comerford’s quote "I have seized light and forced it to make pictures for me" seem victorious.