Film Categories: Asian

  • Bangs

    A comedy about a young Chinese-Canadian girl obsessed with her large egg-like forehead. “A deftly funny work.” – Peter Goddard,The Toronto Star

  • Sally’s Beauty Spot

    In this lively, intimate film, a large black mole above an Asian woman’s breast serves as a metaphor for cultural and sexual difference. Off-screen women’s voices and scenes form the 1960 Hollywood miscegenation melodrama “The World of Suzie Wong” counterpoint Sally’s own interracial encounters and emerging self-awareness. A stylish and playfully impressionistic account of racial expectations and role-playing which critiques Western stereotypes of Asian femininity. “…challenges fetishistic and colonialist forms of representation, wittily tracing a character’s move from stereotypical object to sexual subject.” – Laura U. Marks, Afterimage “Framed as a struggle with identity and racialized notions of beauty, this…

  • Base Tranquility

    This film, done in the fine tradition of hand-painted images and sound, deals with Western man’s fetish for technology.

  • Small Pleasures

    “Small Pleasures” is the first Chinese-Canadian feature film made by a Chinese-Canadian. It is about two young women from Beijing studying in Toronto, who experience life in the West during the Tiananmen Square student demonstrations in 1989.

  • So Far So

    A pencil portrait of the artist as a young woman. My Boyfriend Gave Me Peaches: Fleming utilizes her quirky, elegantly minimalistic style to superb effect in this film, a humorously nasty teenage girls’ ditty about a mean boyfriend who gets bumped down the stairs and carted off in an ambulance. I Love My Work: In the faux-naif stick-figure animation Fleming describes the plight of the modern woman who insists on trying to get to work, despite horoscope warnings that she should stay at home.

  • Ten Cents a Dance (Parallax)

    “Parallax is the apparent change in position of an object resulting from the change in direction or position from which it is viewed.” Confusion, underlying meaning, and unspoken truths are often associated with the dialectic of sexual communication. Mingled with the intensity and unpredictability of a “one night stand,” they generate unique sensations – mixed emotion, risk, excitement. The film employs formal devices in a manner which is simple yet effective. Its subject matter – sexuality and communication – gains depth and poignancy through the artist’s decision to shoot the film’s three scenes for projection in a double-screen configuration, providing…

  • There, Try Alive…

    “There is a voice crying in the wilderness”, Catherine Clement and Hellen Cixous say, “the voice of the body dancing, laughing, shrieking, crying. Whose is it?” It is they say, “the voice of a woman, newborn and yet archaic, a voice of milk and blood, a voice silenced but savage.” Introduction of “The Newly Born Woman” by Hellen Cixous and Catherine Clement. This film is an experimental psychodrama in which a woman goes through an incredible inner journey in which all fear, confusion, desire and attempts are bound and conquered towards a better understanding of herself. The doors represent the…

  • These Shoes Weren’t Made for Walking

    The filmmaker documents the lives of four women in his family, using their shoes as a common reference and as a springboard for thoughtful and provocative contemplations about their experiences. These four women (paternal grandmother, mother, paternal aunt, sister) recount and discuss the cultural and socio-economic forces that have shaped their lives. From the four-inch “golden lotus” embroidered silk sandals designed to fit my great-grandmother’s bound feet during the Ching Dynasty in Imperial China, to the tennis shoes and Italian leather pumps sported by my career-minded chartered accountant sister, the poignant stories behind their shoes are revealed. The film ends…

  • Thick Lips Thin Lips

    A musical experimental film about racist and homophobic violence.

  • Things in Between

    “Things in Between” is a story about a wife, her husband, and his lover. The film invites viewers to share the self-discovery of two women: Betty, an East Indian, who has just left her husband Phil; and Betty’s girlfriend Cannes, a Chinese, who is secretly Phil’s lover. Caught between desire and friendship, they must now face painful choices…