Film Categories: Aging

  • The Evening Thread

    An old woman prepares to die. Accompanied by her granddaughter, she reflects on the memories of her life, and on the profound experience of being human, before taking the next step into the unknown.

  • Audrey’s Beard

    “Audrey’s Beard” was shot on my beloved Bolex camera. The film was conceived as a time-lapse documentary film experiment with shots of this once butch dyke filmmaker’s beard growing in over a 21-day period in the early 1990’s. At the time it felt like it was a very transgressive act as an artist, transitioning gender, to grow the beard I had felt ashamed of for so many years, using my body to tell a story, coming to terms with the shame of being born Intersex in a creative and empowering way. Ten years later, in 2001, a potent voice over…

  • Queer Camp Trilogy

    The Queer Camp Trilogy is a series of experimental films exploring the hidden dimensions of queer Japanese American wartime history. This trilogy, made up of Looking For Jiro (2011), Warning Shot (2016), and On the Line (2018), was inspired by first-generation Japanese Americans who were incarcerated by the US government during World War II. These subjects left subtle yet discernible traces of same-sex intimacy or gender nonconformity in the archive, despite the enormous pressure put upon Japanese Americans to accept their imprisonment quietly, prove their patriotic loyalty, and smile for Ansel Adams during their unlawful imprisonment. I approached their enigmatic…

  • On The Department Of Experiential Medicine II

    Initially an anti-gay marriage performance in a veil, speedo and heels reciting the Litanies of Satan, singing a Galasian Amazing Grace and then upending a bottle of champagne into my prelubed anus where the pressure pushed its contents inside. I then evacuate into two glasses and toast with someone from the audience. It then changed into a DIY AIDS-meds Cocktail performance with me dressed as a nurse, juicing beets and pushing vitamin supplements into my anus before taking the champagne. I then evacuate it into glasses with the beet juice and toast the audience with these cocktails.

  • Birthday Suit

    A remake of the seminal Canadian feminist art tape by Lisa Steele. Featuring Lexi Tronic.

  • The Day Don Died

    Tucked away in the heart of downtown Vancouver, there’s a condo tower that’s home to long-time members of Canada’s performing arts professions: singers, actors, costume designers, dancers, filmmakers, playwrights, jazz musicians, and more. Now picture this: on Easter Saturday, the residents of Vancouver’s Performing Arts Lodge wake up to discover jazz singer and beloved tenant Don Stewart has unexpectedly died after a Good Friday performance at a neighbourhood bar. But as news travels between his creative and colourful neighbours, the story of Don’s pass takes on a life of its own. Every resident has their own version of what really…

  • Death of a Gentleman

    Playing tour guide, the director takes the audience through his own disintegration as an old man. Hints of his past loom about in the form of himself as a young boy and a beautiful woman who emanates a relinquished love – or love relinquished. All this, and eventually his own death, must play out in front of the dismissive narrator.

  • Man That Got Away, The

    A musical documentary that tells the true life story of Trevor’s great-uncle Jimmy in six original songs.

  • SHE IS THE OTHER GAZE

    Every encounter with an image, every interaction searches for its own form. SHE IS THE OTHER GAZE describes the encounter with female visual artists mostly of an older generation who were part of the Viennese art scene in the 1970s and were engaged in the women’s movement. In dialogue with the filmmaker and her camera they share early works and artistic practices. They remember how their self-determination evolved between artistic ambitions, economic constraints, adaptation and resistance to the prevailing patriarchal social structures. In their role as feminist pioneers the protagonists are a great influence on the contemporary art scene and…

  • The Solitary Life of the Stoic

    The ‘Solitary Life of the Stoic’ is a short documentary project that juxtaposes the formidable life story of a dignified woman in her nineties with imposing architectural structures and expressive imagery. Shot in Central Europe and integrated with portraits of Leah Laufer in Toronto, this film aligns visual poetry with the wisdom of an old friend, candid confessions of life at her stage and the gratitude of a Holocaust survivor.