Film Categories: Families

  • Holy Mother My Mother

    A portrait of motherhood filmed during the Navratri celebrations (The Goddess Festival) in India.

  • Epilogue

    Epilogue: a section or speech at the end of a book or play that serves as a comment on or a conclusion to what has happened. A trip to bury my grandmother’s ashes results in an unearthing of things long obscured by time. Imbued with unanswered questions from the Lion series, Epilogue continues the biographical inquiry of The Weight of Snow and chronicles the aftermath of a dying matriarch and a family navigating cohesion.

  • Performing Girl

    Performing Girl is a short documentary about D’Lo, a queer, transgender, Tamil Sri Lankan American actor, writer, director and comic who got his start at age 11, performing for his family and classmates in the desert town of Lancaster, CA. Animations, home movies, and family snapshots paint the portrait of his personality. In interviews and clips from his performances, D’Lo and his parents explain how his identity and their relationship has changed over the last twenty years.

  • Everything’s for You

    “Everything’s for You” reflects the filmmaker’s relationship with his deceased father, a man who survived both the Lodz Ghetto and Auschwitz. The film utilizes a combination of previously shot material (1974-78), family photographs, archival footage, printed footage, cell animation sequences (by Emily Hubley), and computer graphics to create a mosaic, a meditation on filial relationships. Dialogue is in both Yiddish and English. “… Ravett makes old snapshots flicker like candles in the wind. Archival footage of the Lodz ghetto appears in ethereal negative. The film is composed of dreamlike fragments and traces, accompanied by Ravett’s incantatory interrogation of these mute…

  • Adrift in Sunset

    Dao is ready to go on her date but she also has to spend time with her mom who has Alzheimer’s—bringing her gallivanting ways to a halt. Is it really a good idea to combine the two?

  • Take it apart and put together again

    Take it apart and put together again is an experimental film about the start of the Swedish Chopper club called Sofia Hogs, founded in 1968 at Söder in Stockholm. The club was inspired by the Flower Power Movement and the film Easy Rider. The film draws from an inside personal perspective, childhood, reflections, memories and photographs from several family photo albums. Linus Winstam aka DJ Bruce Leenus, creator of the film’s sound collage, is also the son of the one of the persons who speaks in the film. The film is supported by The Swedish Arts Grants Committee

  • Confidente (Confident)

    This is me.

  • Learning To Milk A Cow

    When the filmmaker’s grandmother was 19, she was taken from Soviet Ukraine to Germany to work on a Bavarian farm under National Socialism. She had the luck and perseverance to survive hardships of the forced famine in her homeland and forced labour in the new one. The stories of her everyday life – learning how to milk a cow, falling in love – are interspersed with three generations of reflections on politics, longing, feelings of displacement and loss. Hand-processed black & white film, colour film, photographs and official documents create a montage of different perspectives. The hand-touch aesthetic combines with…

  • Fading Away

    For my family a way of life has faded away, even the memories are fading. I am left with fragments of stories, old photographs, and knick knacks. I never lived on that farm. I will never live there, except through the memories of others. (Elaine Pain)

  • Family Daycare: Through a New Lens

    This work grew organically out of the Family Daycare Education Project, a ten-month research and outreach project based at the Cabrillo College Early Childhood Education Department in Aptos, California. The tape includes extensive footage of children in family daycare situations, modelling use of home environments and good adult/child interaction. There are scenes from neighbourhood-based classes attended by providers, including one of Spanish-speaking providers in the Flats, Santa Cruz. Throughout the tape, providers speak for themselves – outlining the issues, needs and motivation. Nancy Andreasom, experienced educator and director of the project, speaks about the importance of recognizing and responding to…