Film Categories: art & artists

  • Selected Works by the Loop Collective: Volume 1

    A selection of films produced between 2005-2011 by members of The Loop Collective, a Toronto-based group of independent filmmakers, musicians, dancers and multimedia artists who strive to connect cinema to related interdisciplinary art forms. 1. fugitive l(i)ght 2. c: won eyed jail 3.Thaw 4. Parícutin 5.Quanta 6. Shapes Eat Shapes 7. Levitas 8. Spiders in Eden 9. The Changing Light 10. Christ Church – Saint James 11. Thought Form 12. Morning 13. Many Glimpses 14. Movement / Stasis (documentation)

  • Joaquin La Habana – LebenZwischenWelten (Joaquin La Habana – Living Between Worlds)

    Joaquín La Habana – Lebenzwischenwelten is a documentary portrait of the transformation artist Joaquín La Habana, an androgynous Cuban-born singer, dancer and entertainer, who currently resides in Berlin, Germany. As he plays effortlessly with changing gender and culture, his opera-trained voice switches easily from the baritone of a rebel to the soprano of a seductress. Now in his sixties, Joaquín La Habana reflects on his life and career during the ’70s and ’80s as part of New York City’s provocative underground scene. The film contains impressive archival material, including Joaquín La Habana’s performance at the famous nightclub, Studio 54.

  • Pepper’s Ghost

    How we may see in a Chamber things that are not! Here, mutations of light, through fabric, glass, and colored gel, make bodies and objects transparent. Let there be a chamber wherein no other light comes but by the door or window. Let pictures be set over against this window. For what is without will seem to be within, and what is behind the spectator’s back, he will think to be in the middle of the room, as far from the glass inward as they stand from it outwardly. Clearly and certainly, he will think he sees nothing but truth.

  • INTER-MEZZO

    INTER-MEZZO is a documentary of performance as well as a performance of documentary. Through a triptych, which treats the voice as a metaphor for political voice, Stephen Chen traces his journey as a male mezzo, faced with prejudice and marginalization back in Singapore, and later in North America. The schooling and suppression of his voice becomes interwoven with his experiences of colonialism and exile. DOH! OH DEAR, A FEMALE TEAR! plays with the biography documentary form, dealing with issues of voice / gender / representation as Stephen traces his westernization, the discovery and silencing of his voice, and people’s reactions…

  • Watercolor (Fall Creek)

    Water flows under two bridges, or so it may appear. Since the advent of the industrial age, there has been a heated dialogue regarding the relationship between earth’s natural environment and manufactured human spaces. Watercolor (Fall Creek) exists between these necessary worlds, as time unfolds and remains difficult to comprehend.

  • Brimstone Line

    Three grids are placed along the Credit River in rural Ontario. They become devices through which the stationary camera, pointing upstream, delineates the landscape. They motivate the movement of the zoom, which intensifies our sense of the field of view, narrowing vision and flattening space. The river, framed momentarily, flows past. Financial assistance provided by the Toronto Arts Council.

  • Schuh Schnell Service

    A simple intersection in Wuppertal, Germany becomes a microcosm of the patterns of everyday life. Cars trace the angles of the streets, pedestrians forge new paths and Wuppertal’s famed Schwebebahn turns our expectations upside-down. Shot on Super 8 in Wuppertal April 28, 2009, while making Phantoms.

  • Dating Sucks: A Genderqueer Misadventure

    An animated documentary web-series about the successes, failures, and incredible confusion trying to date as a genderqueer/trans person.

  • Submerged Queer Spaces

    Submerged Queer Spaces is a documentary feature that examines queer history through an approach of urban archeology. Our cameras look at surviving architectural details of old haunts as if unearthing ancient monuments. As San Francisco grew and gentrified, communities changed, shifted, and were displaced. Bars, restaurants, parks, alleys, bathhouses, and other gathering spots of the queer community were remodeled, repurposed, rebuilt, or destroyed. Submerged Queer Spaces looks at the architectural remains of historic sites and buildings in San Francisco. Eight interview subjects recount firsthand experiences in these lost environs. Gerald Fabien experienced gay San Francisco before WWII, and tells tales…

  • The Alicorn

    The film takes the form of a three-tiered hallucination: a dream within a dream within a dream. A pharaoh time travels from the future to ancient Egypt and dreams of a medieval tavern where people are suffering from the Black Plague. In the tavern, on the brink of death, an old crone tells her life story. The woman’s story, narrated in old English song, alludes to her salvation by the appearance of an alicorn borne by her younger sister. Themes of women’s stories, power, and transgression are woven throughout the narrative.