Film Categories: Families

  • Porcaria

    The year is 1968 and Joaquim and Amalia Quinteiro are just your average young new immigrant couple, drawing blood over money matters and overdosing on culture shock. Into their nest of perfect domestic bliss flies the ever popular, handsome young university student border, Joao. Amalia gets a job and Joaquim’s already flagging machismo shoots off the exit ramp. Perhaps only Joao’s devilish derriere can buttress this poor male ego. A love triangle of unusual proportions, “Porcaria” demonstrates a total lack of resistence to new world charms that has the fish jumping off the walls.

  • Potters at Work

    In Japan, a man works with his sons and apprentices fashioning pots. A woman scoops off water from a clay settling tank while another lifts out heavy, wet handfuls of clay. An ancient brick kiln is walled up at night. Working with understanding and affection, refusing such aids as commentary and music, th filmmaker, creating from the pattern of the potter’s work, shows precisely how pots are crafted and has captured a vision of creativity radically different from western concepts of art-making.

  • Pretending We Were Indians

    “This short animated film represents the recollections of a woman whose native ancestry was obscured by the social mores of the recent past. Tracing fragments of information as she walks, the woman speculates on what really happened to her ancestors and herself.” – Frances Leeming

  • Print No Charge

    When a son and his estranged father embark on a fishing trip together, something goes wrong. “Print No Charge” is the story of a distant and strained relationship with a thought-provoking ending. As a teaching device, the film’s form articulates its content. The film stimulates creative response.

  • Prison Art

    The son (and my Godson) of one of the Directors, Mr. Garegin Zakoyan, who is the founder and the General Manager of the Cenematheque Armenia, was imprisoned in 1994 on false charges. Trips to a prison became a routine for the family, and prompted us to make use of our access to otherwise forbidden domain of the penitentiary system. Thus the film was conceived. 90 percent of the narration is taken from the letters of my Godson and Sergey Paradjanov. (MB)

  • private patch of blue, a

    “I have breathed you in and there are no words to exorcise you from my soul.” – Eleanor Crow “An auto-portrait of maternity, ‘private patch’ shows Toronto filmer Tracy German quietly expectant, keening through winterludes of surprise before the birth of her first child. Episodically structured and materially assured, German’s exacting observational sense re-creates her domestic surround from the point of view of her boy-to-be, lurking over woodpiles and rock with eyes wide in wonder, turning the surrounding bush into a softly focused pastel glaze. “Deftly intercutting interiors and exteriors, ‘private’ opens on a wintry porch, a liminal architectural space…

  • Private Property / Public History

    “Having acquired a set of family snapshots at an auction sale, Doyle traced their origins to an Ontario family. She talked with the now-elderly women and reconstructed the photographs and the dialogue in this film which confronts issues of photographic representation and its uses in family history.” – “Toronto: A Play of History,” The Power Plant, 1987

  • Puamana

    Aloha! This gentle portrait of Auntie Irmgard Farden Aluli, one of Hawaii’s best-loved composers, focuses on Hawaiian women’s contributions to family structure, art, music and dance. An intimate glimpse into the real culture of the islands.

  • Punch Me in the Stomach

    “Life imitating art” is how comic Deb Filler describes the connection between her real life family and the characters she depicts in her offbeat 36-character solo show “Punch,” which balances humour, love, passion and pathos. Recreating the diverse eclectic experiences of her far-flung family by magically transforming herself into character after character, this is the story of a Holocaust survivor wih a difference. These stories mould themselves into a comic repertoire which is daring and delicate. Her comic talent is best described as Jackie Mason meets Tracey Ullman, with the British comedienne’s flair for mimicry and the Lower East Side…

  • Reading Between the Lines

    Reading the replies to a personal ad she has placed, a woman imagines herself in relationships with three different men. The film uses both layering and fragmentation to weave a web of associations and create a dynamic and fast-moving flow of images and events. Quick flashbacks, like momentary thoughts, accumulate. The reading voice is the constant, a soft steady interior voice around which the images dance and leap. The most dramatic moments of a given scenario are played out in a realistic fashion, and some scenarios, differently imagined, are repeated with each of the men: the restaurant, the dance, the…