Film Categories: art & artists

  • How to Make a Phantastik Film

    A look at the traditional 50s housewife and her attempts at counter-culture. Brought to you by Phantastik.

  • little fountains

    A meditation on cultural appropriation and nature’s myth. Prompted by Roland Barthes’ “Mythologies”, the videomakers have found a microcosm of the new age wasteland within little fountains. The work is an object focused meditation within a young woman’s life is brought to attention.

  • Lecciones en Proceso (Lessons in Process)

    “Lessons in Process” is a poetic documentary about a film making workshop given by Canadian filmmaker Philip Hoffman at the famed Escuela Internacional de Cine y Televisión de San Antonio de los Baños in Cuba. Founded in 1986 by Argentinean poet and filmmaker Fernando Birri, Colombian writer Gabriel García Marquez and Cuban filmmakers Julio Garcia Espinosa, and Thomas Gutirres Alea, “the school of the three worlds” was established to give students from developing countries in Latin America and the Carribean, Africa and Asia, an opportunity to participate in the democracy of the image. Hoffman collaborates with the students to produce…

  • Buffalo Death Mask

    A conversation with Canadian painter Stephen Andrews returns us to a pre-cocktail moment, when being HIV+ afforded us the consolation of certainty.

  • Dr. Bish Remedies

    From Ross Lipman’s “personal ethnographies” series, an informal visit with legendary filmmaker Bruce Baillie at his home on Camano Island in Washington State. “From the lone transcendent biker riding the two-lane highway of nightmares in 1964’s Mass for the Dakota Sioux to 1970’s Quick Billy, Baillie blazed a path through nothing less than the American consciousness itself, closing the cycle with the Quixotic epigram “Ever Westward Eternal Rider!” As the admonishment warns, the journey continues, and endpoints are illusionary – only movement is of essence. –“Whither Bruce Baillie?”, Ross Lipman, 2010

  • Cuki Colorinchi Evolution

    A masked crochetist shows us his sudden immersion into crochet art. Spanish with English subtitles

  • Happy

    The quest for happiness dictates the shape of many lives in the world. Some find religion, some seek love, but all are searching to be happy. “Happy” moves through hand-processed 16mm film to explore the intersection of happiness, apostasy, and love. “Happy” considers the fiction of happiness and what it truly means, how it is proselytized in the church, media, and each other. Can simply smiling bring about an emotional change? Can being told to be happy make you happy? Has anyone told you that god loves you?

  • Walking Away 2

    Scarborough Bluffs (1974): a woman walks away from us, through a field of grass. Approaching a treeline, she turns and crosses the frame. Instead of panning to accommodate her, the camera zooms wider – the woman continues to diminish as if still walking away and the landscape is fully revealed. The shot partially repeats: a wipe transition replaces the grass with water, and a ‘shipscape’ from Toronto’s Port Lands (2011) is revealed. Poetically, light reflected from downtown office towers catches the sail of a boat crossing the frame. Then amusingly, a split-screen sequence underlines the correspondence between woman and sailboat.

  • Breaking and Entering

    Adapted from a short story of the same name by Canadian author Andrew Pyper, “Breaking and Entering” is a poetic parable of a young man coming to terms with the death of his father. The film was near completion at the time of Hull’s death and was subsequently finished by The Estate of Andrew Hull.

  • Hoshi Neko (Little Star)

    This 16mm B&W cut-out animation borrows narrative tropes from early Atari video games, silent films, and anime cartoons, offering a weird story and hybrid aesthetic. The narrative is based on the imagined adventures of the singer’s lost cat, Hoshi. Hoshi eats a koi fish, who emerges angry from his digestive system. The koi enlists the help of a pug to exact revenge, and the three characters embark on an epic chase through the cosmos. Their journey brings them through wormholes and across poisonous planets where their skin is melted off by acid rain.