Film Categories: film studies

  • INDUSTRY: Recent Works by Richard Kerr – Limited Edition

    INDUSTRIE / INDUSTRY Oeuvres récentes / Recent Works by Richard Kerr Edited by Brett Kashmere Part high-tech, part handmade, this unique DVD-format exhibition catalog contains two hours of audio-visual material, including three new collage films and a spellbinding slide show by the Montreal filmmaker and visual artist Richard Kerr, as well as a bonus 60-minute audio collage/radio drama by Gerstyn Hayward. Packaged in original handcrafted and painted covers, the disc is accompanied by 70 pages of critical writing, notebook drawings, production notes, photographs, exhibition documentation and related artworks, plus a pullout gallery floor plan. With essays, conversations, program notes and…

  • INDUSTRY: Recent Works by Richard Kerr – Educational Edition

    INDUSTRIE / INDUSTRY Oeuvres récentes / Recent Works by Richard Kerr Edited by Brett Kashmere This unique DVD-format exhibition catalog contains two hours of audio-visual material, including three new collage films and a spellbinding slide show by the Montreal filmmaker and visual artist Richard Kerr, as well as a bonus 60-minute audio collage/radio drama by Gerstyn Hayward. The disc is accompanied by 70 pages of critical writing, notebook drawings, production notes, photographs, exhibition documentation and related artworks, in printable PDF format. With essays, conversations, program notes and other texts by Gerda Johanna Cammaer, Randolph Jordan, Brett Kashmere, Michael Rollo, Astria…

  • Broken

    This short film stars Tara Spencer Nairn (New Waterford Girl, Corner Gas etc.) as Allie. Allie is an independent girl who was in a relationship that cut too deep into her world. She finds herself in unfamiliar emotional territory and reacts by running away. Danny (Benjamin Rouse) her ex, can’t understand why all has fallen apart. He has also found himself in unfamiliar emotional territory but is driven to fight through this landscape regardless of the danger he faces within himself. Danny is lost in the chaos of love retracted and in this moment of desperation he is willing to…

  • In Search of Johnny Dean

    Comedy: A tribute to agents worldwide… Johnny (Benjamin Rouse) is a fast talking agent who will say anything to get his talent to believe him and to do what he wants them to do…even if that means at one moment flattering them and the next being shamelessly honest. He contradicts himself constantly due largely to his fast paced shifting reality. Gerald (Pat O’Leary) is one of Johnny’s recruits and he is feeling out the situation at Johnny’s office. In Mr. Dean’s world things can get a little crazy and Gerald is torn between the lure of stardom and his inability…

  • Love in the White City

    “Made with a camera the size of a deck of cards carried in my pants pocket for one year, the ‘White City’ beckons, repulses and quakes with portent. The original poem was commissioned by CBC Radio in 2002 on the theme, ‘Love in Winnipeg’ – it began at 3 am in mid-February at 30 below, on a drive home through an empty, wind-swept, snowbound city. An audience member in my home town asked me why this film in particular was so dark, so sad. I said I didn’t find it to be so, but I wish I’d said something to…

  • Trains of Winnipeg (the short)

    “An epic audiovisual poem. Trains as kinetic sculpture and kitsch, found sound art, a film-maker’s fetish or a Romantic’s wet dream: O take me to far away places, the rhythm in our plastic hearts, as we are also machines. Tortured cello, the scraping wheel, old cameras, film and rail as parallel tracks through the remnants of the industrial age. ‘Trains of Winnipeg’ uses multiple film gauges and digital formats in a collage of colliding and looping vantage points on this brief, ever-moving, moment in history.” Music by Emily Goodden.

  • F Movie

    “An homage to ‘Sesame Street,’ it was made with a brief loop of Super 8 footage shot across the Strait of Juan de Fuca – just 14 miles from Victoria to the Washington State coast and Bangor (the world’s largest nuclear submarine base and a primary Cold War target). “This hilltop view was many things to us while growing up: a place to peer out at the dark with a date, tongue-tied; a place to see the first flash of a long expected nuclear strike; a place to almost hear the bombs dropping on far-off Pacific villages; and up in…

  • 18,000 Dead in Gordon Head

    “In the summer of 1982, during a visit to the my hometown of Victoria, I witnessed the murder of a teenage girl – killed by a sniper on a quiet, suburban street, in the middle of the afternoon. I returned a year later to lie with my camera on the spot where she died, and to roam the neighbourhood searching for footage. The title of this film comes from the oft-quoted statistic that the average sixteen-year-old has witnessed 18,000 murders, on TV and at the movies. ‘Gordon Head’ is the Canadian suburb where the film takes place. “The original footage…

  • Hitler (Revisited)

    “In 1996, my 16mm film ‘Hitler!’ screened at the London International Film Festival, not far from where its subject, my brother, was born. In this way, Niall Holden, who has been institutionalized for over 25 years, has travelled around the world. “This is the final film in a trilogy about my relationship with my severely schizophrenic brother. ‘Hitler! (Revisited)’ is a partly hands-on, partly digital, ‘re-mix’ of the earlier film. With the assistance of film-maker Sol Nagler, I literally deconstructed a print of the earlier film, separating it back into individual shots, which we then put through a variety of…

  • Burning Down the Suburbs

    “On the side of a country highway, a nuclear family watches its four-wheel drive burn to the ground. What were we thinking? they seem to ask themselves. This film is an attempted update of a Dylan Thomas masterpiece, but read at a Jack in the Box picketed by P.E.T.A. “While making this one I wanted to create a ‘mini film set’, so I asked film-maker Caelum Vatnsdal to act as camera operator. As it turned out, he’d burned and filmed many toys as a child, and so became a key part in the making of this work.” Figures (modeling compound,…