Feature Documentary | 81 mins. | dir. Emily Packer | Sound Design

Ghosts of over-farmed oysters haunt New York City, the former oyster capital of the world, with cautionary tales of overconsumption. Meanwhile, environmental hopefuls work to repopulate these queer heroes. This experimental hybrid documentary explores their dated symbolism as high-class aphrodisiacs, celebrating their role filtering the waterways and protecting our coastlines. Preview screening: Mimesis Documentary Festival, 2023. Premiere: DocNYC, 2023.

“Your umbilical cord is cut twice, once when you are born and once when your mother dies.”

From Sarah: “The title of this work comes from a saying that my mother told me in reference to her own mother’s death, even though she adamantly denies ever saying it. Using a conversation that I recorded between my mother, sister, and me as the backbone, this neon light and sound installation is an intimate and electric portrait of the women in my family and our complex dynamics around motherhood, infertility, adoption, abuse, love and death.” First Showing: MC Gallery, NYC, October 2023.

Feature Documentary | 78 mins | dir. Rami Younis, Sarah Ema Friedland | Sound Design, animations

This feature-length, sci-fi documentary shares multiple pasts, presents, and futures of the city of Lyd in Palestine/Israel. From the perspective of the city herself, voiced by Palestinian actress Maisa Abd Elhadi, the viewer is guided through the lifespan of a five-thousand-year-old city and its residents. Premiere: Amman International Film Festival, 2023.

16mm, Direct Animation on Film and Digital Animation | 2022| 8 mins| dir. Sarah Friedland | Sound Design

A Hemlock forest in Western Massachusetts that is dying due to the Woolly Adelgid beetle infestation tells a larger story about climate collapse and the interconnections between the natural and the built environments. Premiere: Mimesis Documentary Festival, 2023.

Short Documentary | 22 mins. | dir. Elisa Gonzalez | Sound Design

Freya connects elements in the animal world and the practice of falconry to experiences of mothering, pregnancy and loss. Screenings: Pleasure Dome, 2023.

Audio Piece | 2022 | 9.5 mins

First appeared on BBC 4’s Short Cuts as part of the episode, Weather Report. A blend of multigenerational voices weave together the story of my mummi's death 25 years later. A mixture of humour, intensity, intimacy that investigates the way memory both fogs and solidifies over time for the individual and the collective. Thank you to Kari Siirala, Bailey Renshaw, Maarit Siirala, Gord Smith, Micah Smith and Casey King for sharing their memories of the trip.

Audio Walk | 2021 | 60 mins | Sound design, Mixing

Switching Queen(s): Back Alley Galaxies is the first audio tour of b current Performing Arts' Wheel of the Year Walks. Through soundscapes of words, everyday life, music, and poetry, you will meet fictionalized and real humans in a sharing of blended time and space, transmutation between so-called human and animal species, entities, and spirits. While you move through the lands on which the neighbourhood of Parkdale stands, the Switch Collective will interrogate the challenges -- stemming from colonialism, capitalism, gentrification -- the area and its inhabitants face, and the manifest resilience bursting forth from all of the cracks.

Audio Piece | 2021 | 5 mins |Co-produced with Kalli Anderson

First appeared on BBC 4’s Short Cuts for the episode Moonlight. Also played as part of On Air Fest, Audire, Radio Olimpia, and was a finalist for Best Documentary short as part of the 2021 Third Coast/Richard H. Driehaus Foundation Competition.

Hybrid Documentary Short | 2020 | 7 min. Directed and Produced by Sarah Ema Friedland and Alessandra Lacorazza, in co-production with the Meerkat Media Collective | sound design

At a border check point, pregnant people are forced to endure invasive and emotionally abusive measures in order to get an abortion. The dialogue in this film is taken verbatim from State-mandated anti-choice materials, and imagines a world in which the territory of the body and the territory of the nation are collapsed into one space.

Documentary Short | 2020 | Sound Design | dir. by Sean Hanley.

Three animal lives entangle at the edge of the sea. Horseshoe crabs spawn on eroded urban beaches, migrating shorebirds seek sustenance at a midpoint, and humans attempt to make a difference in this age of mass extinction. Premiere: 2020 Imagine Science Film Festival.

Audio Piece | 2019 | 10 mins | commissioned by constellations for Resonant Bodies installation and podcast

Where is the cloud located on earth? Hamina, Finland imagines a sauna experience where seawater travels to cool immense google data servers and then evaporates into steam as bodies heat up in a neighbouring sauna.

image by Yuula Benivolski

Audio Piece | 2018 | 15 mins | For constellations audio, a series of tangential associations as three people meditate on light and dark and the way they read the environment around them.

Narrative Short | 2018 | 11 mins | dir. Alessandra Lacorazza | Sound Design

As Carolina's sense of isolation grows so does her anger at her mother for emotionally anchoring her to their apartment.

Documentary Short | 2016 | 14 mins | dir. Tomasz Gubernat | Sound Recordist, Designer, Mix

Girls and Boys is an observational portrait of a woman in Brooklyn, seemingly alone in her struggle to teach a group of playful, young students who are learning the basics of couple’s dancing in the Polish Folk tradition. Set in the basement auditorium of one of North Brooklyn’s last functioning Catholic schools, Girls and Boys offers an intimate glimpse into the interactions of adolescence and the sometimes comical challenges of the teaching experience.

Documentary Portrait | 2014 | 3:42 | dir. Zachary Finkelstein | Sound Design

Max Dean is a 2014 winner of the Governor General's Awards in Visual and Media Arts.