Film Categories: Families

  • This Time Last Year

    On Thanksgiving of 2001, Daniel set her video camera to run while she and her family got ready to pose for a photograph. One year later, she turns the footage, together with notes from the same time, into a portrait of all that is no longer there. “Daniel explores loss as something sensed, felt and lived with in this poetic portrait of the absences we feel in the moments we capture on film.” – Images Festival 2003

  • Parenthesis

    A simple inadvertent sequence of a few unassuming moments ends up feeling somehow sad and somehow beautiful. How this happens is hard to say. It has something to do with the interplay between what we can and cannot see, the incidental tensions underlying each small moment, the figures forming and reforming on the side.

  • Confessions of a Compulsive Archivist

    Built from artifacts recovered from her own then her mother’s storage closet, “Confessions of a Compulsive Archivist” follows the filmmaker’s tragic-comic struggle to let go of a few things of obviously no use to her. Part found footage film, part camera-less video, it turns stuff that should have been thrown out long ago into a poignant study of the relationship between the creative imagination and our attachments, be they material or emotional. “[One of] about a dozen superlative selections by women, [and an example of] an intriguing crop of new video works examining the medium’s widespread, elemental function as a…

  • Cuentos de Mi Ninez (Tales from My Childhood)

    “In 1973, General Augusto Pinochet launched a violent coup in Chile that overthrew the Marxist elected president Salvador Allende. Thousands were killed, tortured, imprisoned, and exiled as a result. My family was among the many that were exiled in Canada.” – Francisca Duran In this experimental, autobiographical film, a young woman remembers and recounts difficult childhood memories of the 1973 coup in Chile when her family was forced into exile.

  • Two Unrelated Shots

    An ode to our imaginative and creative instincts, “Two Unrelated Shots” is simply the outcome of a need to make something.

  • Two Hummingbirds

    A beautifully understated work that creates an almost palpable sense of absence through a simple interplay of word and image.

  • Pictures of Things That Aren’t There

    “Pictures of Things That Aren’t There” is an anthology of six works loosely tied together by the circumstance of their making: all were initiated while Daniel was caring for her mother as she lived out her life with a disease that erodes the frontal and temporal lobes of the brain. Her mother’s illness is never more than peripherally addressed. Daniel attends instead to the unnoticed workings of the creative imagination – the capacity of mind she believed her mother had lost. They are small works, made for one person and offered to anyone else who cares to appreciate them. Aesthetic…

  • Pepere’s Chairs

    The story of Pepere’s Chairs was conceived by my mother, visual artist Maryse Maynard. It is a playful tale about a group of chairs that once belonged to her ancestors. Once the film had been recorded and edited, it was projected onto hand-embroidered canvases which served as the screen. Maryse had embroidered the canvases with chairs, and every once in a while, an embroidered chair could be glimpsed floating in the background of the film.

  • Parricide Sessions, The

    In a therapeutic cinematic session of sorts, a gay son introduces his ex-lovers to his father – while examining his own fascination with the father figure.

  • Schogt, Elida: A Film Trilogy

    Newly available on DVD, this trilogy from award-winning filmmaker Elida Schogt examines Holocaust memory, the family and the role of photography in history. (For purchase only. For rentals, see individual titles.) ZYKLON PORTRAIT “Zyklon Portrait” is about Zyklon B – the pesticide transformed into a genocidal weapon by the Nazis in the 1940s. It is also an elegy for the filmmaker’s grandparents; after years of silence, the filmmaker’s mother finally talks about her parents’ horrific fate. A Holocaust film without Holocaust imagery, “Zyklon Portrait “ uses family photographs, underwater photography and hand-painted imagery to draw a personal story out of…