Film Categories: art & artists

  • Toe the Line

    TOE THE LINE follows Gloria Chau, a closeted teenage hockey player. When she’s not on the ice, she’s got a guitar in her hands and a snapback on her head. Her mother Nancy, a stylish Hong Kong woman, spends sleepless nights worrying about Gloria’s failing grades. Gloria is torn between two worlds: the fun but cutthroat world of hockey where she gets to be loud and proud in her queerness, and the one at home where she’s a recluse, using music to cope with being forced into becoming someone she’s not. Underlying these tensions is a deep racial divide. She…

  • Manifestarsi

    The film investigates within the microscopic dimension the material component of billboards posted in Milan. The author, through a peculiar perspective – achieved with a unique optic – goes beyond the limits of vision, inviting us to fall into the alienating but enveloping physical structure beyond the mythical surface of the images. The cinematic result is an atmosphere that is not abstract but informal. Where the material reflects a visual condition devoid of perspective references on which to base metaphysical foundations: here the process suspends the essence.

  • Woven Account

    After the artist’s own gaybashing in the Bay Area, they wondered what it would take for their story to make the news. Allegra went on to research reported instances of hate violence targeting LGBTQIA2s+ individuals in the archives of 16 local print and online newspapers. After going through nearly two years of archives – the artist discovered only 33 articles detailing individual hate crimes or stories concerning hate crimes legislation for the broader LGBTQIA2s+ community in the Bay Area. Where they could get their hands on the physical news articles detailing hate crimes, the artist spun that newsprint by hand…

  • Detour

    An experimental film which uses metaphor and simile. Through comedic intention the viewer is placed on a journey with the fillmmaker, following in the tradition of Maya Deren, where the filmmaker himself is transposed into a labyrinth of visuals to express a coming-of-age or a transformation. Shot on a phone with a shoestring budget, Tolyak attempts to convey a message just with things around him and through what he finds on the road.

  • What You Are Out Here For

    * No Normal Festival 2023 * Official Selection International Portrait Festival 2022 * Gallery Stratford Installation 2022/23 * Official Selection Recontres Internationales Traverse Festival 2022 * Official Selection Athens Animfest 2022 * Official Selection Forest City Film Festival 2021 * Carbon Art & Design Installation 2021 * Bark Park/Washing Machine Outdoor Installation NYC 2021 * Official Selection Van Der Plas Animation Festival & Installation 2021 Springboarding off original illustrations by the internationally renowned artist Jason McLean, What You Are Out Here For experiments with experimental film-making itself, putting McLean’s art for the first time into motion. The open-ended and coming-of-age…

  • Water Over Glass

    * Official Selection Antimatter Film Fetsival 2020 * Official Selection Vancouver International Film Festival 2019 (nominated Best of BC Film Award) In Water Over Glass, the tension of a mind adrift and in conflict with itself is captured and bookended visually by the vast mutability of sea and sky, where water and air surfaces suggest both static and the dissolution of the individual. A doppelganger, a crime scene and the tidal erasure of what might have taken place: discomfiting moments in a bright, almost psychedelic, arc. Assembled from 16mm, super 8, and digital video, stop-motion collage and digital compositing animation,…

  • Goldstar

    An intimate look at the difference between love and relationships.

  • The Shadow of My Life

    Hanna, a recent immigrant to Canada from Iran, struggles with depression as she tries to process memories of Iran and find her place in a new country. As she rediscovers her passion for painting she finds inspiration from other artists. Told in graphic monochrome animation with occasional striking splashes of red. Image description: A graphic drawing in stark black-and-white depicts a woman and her shadow considering themselves in a mirror.

  • Events in the Tunnel

    Drawn from Super 8 films in the artists’ personal archives as well as found amateur 8mm footage, “Events in the Tunnel” presents an absurdist abbreviated retelling of Canada’s colonial history as defined by that great colonial trope, the cross-country train trip. In the transitional void of a train tunnel, we witness familiar 19th and 20th century paradigms of white middle-class conformity as represented by images of travel, amusement, and domesticity, with Canadian culture embodied by a chimeric portrayal of the early 20th century painter Tom Thomson.

  • Sab Shimono: Acting “As If”

    On the eve of his eightieth birthday, acclaimed Japanese American actor Sab Shimono reflects on his lifelong commitment to the craft of acting, his struggles against racism and homophobia, and how his life was transformed by gay bars and marriage equality.