Film Categories: Families

  • Woodbridge

    “Woodbridge” is a deeply personal exposé of family life within the context of first generation Italian-Canadian Roman Catholics. The film revolves around the journey of a boy from early childhood through adulthood. It highlights the conflicts of growing up in the space between two cultures with radically different customs and values. While this film documents the particular experiences of one child, it is a reflection of a sociological phenomenon common to many Canadian children. “Woodbridge” is different from most other documentary work primarily because the camera adopts the role of the protagonist. It represents the viewer with a multitude of…

  • Fires of Joanna, The

    Set against the bleak landscape of Depression-era Eastern Ontario, this film tells the story of Joanna McVeigh and her struggle to endure a harsh and unforgiving life. Epileptic since childhood and past the age of marriage, Joanna lives alone on a run-down farm with Frank, her alcoholic father. Bound by a promise to her dying mother and haunted by a dark and shameful childhood secret, Joanna illuminates her loneliness with secret imaginings and the pleasure of her one great gift, the ability to set fires with her mind. Joanna’s desire to break free from the confines of her lonely existence…

  • I Know a Place

    Producer: Jane Farrow Writer/Director: Roy Mitchell An intimate, funny, and completely engaging family photo album of a thriving little queer community buried in the heart of the rugged and isolated Ontario steeltown of Sault Ste. Marie. Bob Goddere is at the centre of this historic demi-monde. Director/writer Roy Mitchell accesses this intriguing story through his personal relationship with Bob and the community as someone who grew up in the Sault, and like so many young queers, came out at Bob’s parties in the 1970s and 80s. Conventional wisdom has it that good fences make good neighbours. But when you meet…

  • 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. “Zyklon Portrait” is a Holocaust film without Holocaust imagery: family photographs, underwater photography and hand-painted imagery draw a personal story out of historical minutiae. “Elliptical and eerily beautiful.” – John Doyle, The Globe & Mail Awards: Grand Prize, Bilbao International Festival of Documentary and Short Film, Spain; Best Short, Best Editing and Vision TV Humanitarian Award, Hot…

  • Mothers of Me

    “‘Mothers of Me’ is a visually glorious, abstract study in which the filmmaker explores, partly out of fear, the women in her family, their history of insanity and their response to a repressive environment. Through the use of close-ups and fragmented composition we are compelled to participate in her examination.” – Stacey Donen, Toronto Intenational Film Festival, 1999 Awards: 2nd Prize Danzante de Plata, Festival de Cine de Huesca, Spain; Marian McMahon Award, Images Festival, 2001

  • One Small Step

    Set in South Carolina on the eve of the 1969 Apollo 11 moon walk, “One Small Step” is a dramatic comedy about a rambunctious 8-year-old tomboy, Ernestine “Teen” Miller. Taught by her parents that she can be anything she wants to be, Teen learns that there is one exception to this rule when she announces to her mother that she is determined to “marry” the neighbour girl. Told from the point of view of an extremely creative and self -confident young girl, the film is a visual mixture of Teen’s real family interactions juxtaposed against her fanciful daydream life. Teen’s…

  • Feet

    A portrait of an intimate friend of the artist – Susan Weisser – and her relationships with her 13-year-old son Billy, and 17-year-old daughter, Amanda. The author asked them to reconstruct their daily rituals. The results were enactments, accounts, confidences and arguments that freely crisscross each other with the dynamic created by the presence of the video artist and his “unobtrusive” Hi-8 camera. Surprising events ensue within evocative framings of sounds and images, and the enchanted constructions from the fanciful revelations of the everyday. Part of the TALKING PORTRAITS series. Second prize, Black Maria Film & Video Festival, 1996

  • Smack

    Part documentary, part fiction, and highly experimental, Steve Sanguedolce’s “Smack” follows the story of three brothers (Antonio, Sybil and Zed) as they try to find their way in the world. The brothers exercise their youthful autonomy in defiant ways, exploring all that is forbidden (drugs, crime, violence). Their teenage years are filled with unhealthy, dangerous and criminal behaviour that eventually begins to pull them apart. The stories are told by actual subjects talking about their own lives, and range from religious transformations to heroin overdoses; they are funny, frightening, horrifying and all real. Toronto-based director/cinematographer Steve Sanguedolce matches these interconnected…

  • Walnut Tree, The

    As a follow-up to the award-winning “Zyklon Portrait,” “The Walnut Tree” offers a striking combination of documentary and experimental approaches to examine Holocaust memory, the family, and the role of photography in history. Three girls in Dutch costumes stand posing for their father. This fleeting moment, made static in a photograph, is contrasted with the moving imagery of railway tracks – tracks that carried the death transports – now blurred with memory and time. In a matter-of-fact tone, Schogt’s mother describes how her parents tore several pictures out of the family albums when they fled the Nazis in 1943. The…

  • Angela

    After she falls unconscious while exploring alone in a forest, concern for young Angela’s safety causes family conflict.