Film Categories: art & artists

  • Bubba

    BUBBA shows the portrait of an old man (the filmmaker’s grandfather), altered in several, increasingly abstracting ways. The first way the man is shown is through composite imaging, and the use of masks while shooting 16mm on a Bolex camera, achieving surreal, distorted, cubist-like impressions of the face. The second effect was achieved by sandwiching the negative print and positive print of the original portraits and printing them using a Model J printer. The third, and final effect was generated by hand processing the negative/positive hybrid, alongside negatives from a previous film. The concluding effect is a feeling of the…

  • HOME MADE

    Home Made is an intimate, contemplative portrait of two queer tattoo artists navigating an industry traditionally dominated by white, straight, cisgender males. The film weaves together the parallel narratives of Jasmine, a shop owner in Philadelphia, and sally, a stick-and-poke artist in Brooklyn, through their trials and triumphs.

  • Bruce Eves In Polari

    BRUCE EVES IN POLARI is an intimate, upclose and personal portrait of Bruce Eves, the 2018 winner of Canada’s Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts – that country’s highest honour. Eves’ work has remarkable intrinsic value that also engages key aspects of culture and history. His story began in Toronto’s clique-riven avant-garde art scene in the mid-1970s. As practicing artist and Programming Director for CEAC (Centre for Experimental Art and Communication), among other activities Eves crafted socially-engaged performance art pieces that were shown in Canada, throughout Western and Eastern Europe, as well as the United States. This included…

  • Slumberparty 2018

    Slumberparty 2018 is a remake of a 1984 Super 8 film called Slumberparty made by the Positive Pornographers, a mostly queer collective of Toronto-based artists, activists and sex-workers. Commissioned by A-Space Gallery’s “Developing a Women’s Erotic Language on Film” workshop, Slumberparty was made as a direct intervention in Toronto’s feminist porn debates. They wrote, “we didn’t set out to make a work of art. We set out to make something that might turn us on. Join us for what one previewer called “Mary Poppins’ first lesbian orgy. Slumberparty screened twice in public in 1984 then disappeared until 2016, when the…

  • ‘On The Road’ by Jack Kerouac

    If Jack Ker­ouac wrote his leg­endary novel On the Road on a long paper scroll, why not do it on a long 35mm film roll as well? By re-typing the com­plete book –with the use of 35mm black leader instead of paper on a type­writer– this project attempts, among other things, to con­vert Kerouac’s roman­tic rhyth­mic writ­ing method onto a cold and mechan­i­cal tran­scrip­tion in order to give the work new pos­si­bil­i­ties and read­ings that, when pro­jected at 24 frames a sec­ond, although they do empha­size Kerouac’s inten­tions of imme­di­acy, they trans­form the text into illeg­i­ble blotches of let­ters that…

  • Battle Cry

    At the oldest-running queer theatre in the world, Toronto’s most cerebral drag queen and “tragicomedienne” Pearle Harbour prepares to take the stage for her new show “Battle Cry: Songs Of Warfare & Gaiety”.

  • Ode to the Nine

    “Ode to the Nine” is influenced by video artist Jon Rafman. His work “9-Eyes” and “You, the World and I” inspired the filmmaker to make this video piece. This short experimental video allows the filmmaker to ponder the relevance of the moving image and what impacts it has on the Native experience of the past, present and future.

  • Insect Express

    This is a music video for the song “Insect Express” by Brooklyn-based musician, El Tryptophan. The video explores an intersection of species; insect flight patterns and modes of industrial travel merge as collective rituals in a fever dream.

  • Video Home System

    ‘Video Home System’ traces the convergence of popular culture and politics in Pakistan during the 1980s and 1990s. This video showcases the connections between pop culture and nationalism, and how bootleg economies kept the cinema industry alive during periods of censorship. Image description: A young man sits at a desk behind a pile of VHS tapes, illuminated by a desk lamp. The wall behind him is vivid green.

  • 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…