Artist Spotlight Series: Michelle Mohabeer
2007
62 min
English
Published by Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre
$50
Formats Available:
- DVD
License
- Personal
- Educational
Available for purchase in the CFMDC Shop: https://www.cfmdc.org/shop.
In Michelle Mohabeer’s films and videos, form and content are inextricably connected. Re-working the transformational film aesthetics of “third cinema,” Mohabeer’s experimental documentaries blend archival footage with personal memory, infusing each work with a signature pastiche of political consciousness, poetics and performance.
Study guide includes an essay by Monika Kin Gagnon, Concordia University.
DISC DESCRIPTION
Exposure (1990 / 16mm / 8 min.)
“Exposure” is an experimental documentary that explores issues of race, sexuality and cultural identity. A dialogue between two lesbians of colour (Japanese-Canadian and Afro-Caribbean women) is intercut with photographs, texts, paintings and voice-over.
Coconut/Cane & Cutlass (2003 / Super 8 / 12 min.)
Increasingly separated from his place of birth, a 70-year-old Jewish native of Quebec fuses personal and historical memory to create a sense of belonging.
Echoes (2003 / Video / 3 min.)
A woman reflects on the off-beat moments and stirrings of girlhood experiences that shaped her life.
Tracing Soul (2001 / Video / 6.5 min.)
“Tracing Soul” is a poetic bodyscape where the sacred, sensual, primordial and profane female form imagines and evokes the possibilities of the soul through the coalescing of the fragments, intimate gestures, oblique angles, disintegrating lines and shadows, music and text enveloping the bodily compositions.
Child-Play (1997 / 16mm / 14.5 min.)
Set in an imaginary nameless space that closely resembles the Caribbean, “Child-Play” is an allegorical Dream Tale paralleling the “innocence” of childhood and the elder phases of existence.