Film Categories: body

  • 62 Injections

    Get up, shower, shave, coffee, right? How about get up, jab finger, draw blood, give yourself a needle? Again and again … This film presents the daily routine of the film’s director, an insulin-dependent diabetic. The film records his morning regimen of blood sugar testing, needle preparation, and insulin injection, climaxing with a montage of a month’s worth of needles into various sites on his body. Afraid of needles? This won’t hurt a bit.

  • Book of Knives

    “Book of Knives” is based on seven psychiatric case histories dating from 1905 up to the present. These stories are linked through the interrogation of a modern day woman, Iris, who has murdered her plastic surgeon. “Book of Knives” is a short history of women, technology & madness in the twentieth century, and calls into question both the ethics and methodologies of western scientific enquiry.

  • Chloe

    “Unfortunately, not a lot of research has been done on woman-to-woman transmission,” says the Planned Parenthood Counselor. Chloe is a lesbian who discovers that her ex-girlfriend’s ex-lover has tested HIV positive. Chloe is faced with the realization that though she knows the facts about AIDS, she never thought it posed a threat to her. This frightening scenario serves as a wake-up call to lesbians who haven’t thought enough about female-to-female HIV transmission.

  • Photographer: An Artist’s Journey, The

    A documentary exploring the provocative images of the Jamaican-Canadian visual artist Michael Chambers. Reflecting the new multi-cultural youth culture emerging in large urban centers in Canada and internationally, Chambers photographs nude models in urban and natural settings to comment on the human condition, black identity and stereotypes, self-expression, perceptions of the human body, nudity, racism, sexual orientation and AIDS prevention. The photographer follows Chambers over a five-year period in Canada and Jamaica, and shows his images of nude models taken in New York, Los Angeles, Washington, London and Paris.

  • Self Song / Death Song

    “‘Self Song’ documents a body besieged by cancer. The amber glow of narrowly focused, miniscule, layers of flesh and skin suggests both victory and submission to death. The warm colors of the flesh grooves and textures of the skin seemingly suggest a body, which is very much alive. Yet, there is always an impending darkness. Blackness surrounds the image and occasionally, takes it over altogether. Furthermore, the complex grooves and patterns of the flesh struggle to maintain their focus, suggesting the obscuring and dissolving effects of cancer. “In ‘Death Song’ the response to death is certainly more positive. The film…

  • Vibrant Marvels

    “We did not come into this world. We came out of it…” – Lyall Watson, Gifts of the Unknown We rarely think of the past which occurred before our birth, yet our body and mind seem to remember it well. “Vibrant Marvels” reaches back into our subconscious memories and reminds us of the innateness of dance and music, that resonates in us from generation to generation and which we first encountered while we were in the womb. The membrane of our mother’s belly acted as a resonating drum to which rhythms we responded, as we pushed to become a part…

  • Minus

    “Minus” is a hand-processed, uncut, singular stream of movements. To take away: either to leave remnants of light or to leave remnants of rhythms. Entirely hand-processed and unscathed by the blades of the splicer. This is Chong’s first 16mm film. Inspired by Ritchie Hawkin’s Concept albums.

  • Tracing Soul

    “Tracing Soul” is a poetic bodyscape where the sacred, sensual, primordial and profane female form imagines and evokes the possibilities of the soul through the coalescing of the fragments, intimate gestures, oblique angles, disintegrating lines and shadows, music and text enveloping the bodily compositions. Also available on the DVD compilation “Artist Spotlight Series: Michelle Mohabeer.”

  • Red Book, The

    “The Red Book” is an elliptical, pictographic animated film that uses flat, painted figures and collage elements in both two and three-dimensional settings to explore the realms of memory, language, and identity from the point of view of a woman amnesiac. “The Red Book” suggests the ways in which language defines us, and reaches back into dismemberment myths about creation of different tongues through the breaking apart of bodies (in this case, the woman’s body). As the film progresses, the submerged images of her stored memory appear and collide with the present world in circular rhythms, and there is a…

  • ACHTUNG – die Achtung (concentration chair) | ACHTUNG – Respect (concentration chair)

    “There can be no doubt that all our knowledge begins with experience.” – Immanuel Kant, “Introduction to the Critique of Pure Reason “ Born in the body (…and in time…) “Certainly even today some viewers will be affected by this work. Respect for the true art of filmmaking demanded that even the closeup be kept in, where a razor slices through an eye.” – Warning introduction to the German archival copy of “Un Chien Andalou”