Film Categories: Gender

  • Trans Lives Matter! Justice for Islan Nettles

    A powerful and intensely moving document of a community vigil for Islan Nettles, a transgender Womyn of Colour, concerning her spirit and life. Because the personal is political. Because the brutal and increasing attacks on Trans Womyn of Color are outrageous and their victimization causes outrage. Because healing and action tighten our fists and boom our voices. Islan’s murder was a hate crime, she was only 21. Her vigil was held at Jackie Robinson Park in Harlem, steps away from where she was murdered. This endeavour captured the love and support that the community brought to sustain each other and…

  • Between The Bullet and The Hole

    ‘Between the Bullet and the Hole’ is a film centred on the elusive and complex effects of war on women’s role in ballistic research and early computing. The film features new and archival high-speed bullet photography, schlieren and electric spark imagery, bullet sound wave imagery, forensic ballistic photography, slide rulers, punch cards, computer diagrams, and a soundtrack by Scanner. Like a frantic animation storyboard, it explores the flickering space between the frames, testing the perceptual mechanics of visual interpolation, the possibility of reading or deciphering the gap between before and after. Interpolation – the main task of the women studying…

  • Doorway for Natalie Kalmus

    ‘Doorway for Natalie Kalmus’ is a film centred around the use of colour in moving image technology, exploring the disorienting technicolour prismatic effects of the lamp house of a 35mm colour film printer. Through minute shifts across an abstract colour spectrum, punctuated by a mechanical soundtrack, the film evokes kaleidoscopic perceptual after-images (bringing to mind Paul Sharits, Dario Argento and the Wizard of Oz). Natalie Kalmus was the ex-wife of technicolour inventor Herbert Kalmus, and was the colour consultant for hundreds of colour films, including The Wizard of Oz, Gone with the Wind, the Red Shoes, Black Narcissus and many…

  • The Lunatic

    ” The Lunatic ” is a (non) romantic comedy in which the lead role, Luna, is systematically abandoned by all partners and maddens transformed into the deranged woman who gives title to the short film.

  • (I Know Your) Face

    Exploration of memory and diversity across gender, ethnic, sexuality and socio-economic boundaries as the hero Rose reflects on the many faces she has encountered, seducing, influencing, informing and challenging her perspective, now faded and blended over time, distance, and recreational drug usage.

  • Tear Jerker

    Elliot can’t cry and he needs to. He’s recently been dumped by his ex- girlfriend, who has decided she wants to exclusively date “real” men. His mother is descending deeper and deeper into the progression of her Alzheimer’s disease. And the testosterone he takes regularly seems to have made his body forget how to grieve. “Tear Jerker” is a portrait of a transgender guy faced with difficult life circumstances trying to find new ways to express old and familiar feelings.

  • Mezzo

    When Breanna was 12 years old, she discovered opera and began exploring and acknowledging her gender identity. At age 25, she is the first transgender woman to complete a Masters in Opera at a major conservatory. The film traces the days leading up to her graduation recital while harkening back to the defining moments of her girlhood.

  • Luna e Santur

    “Originally commissioned as a short for Ben Coonley’s My First 3D Part 2 at Microscope Gallery, I expanded this project into what it currently is: hooded figures, violent passion, and stroboscopic tenderness brought on by a paranormal encounter I had in the summer of 2015.” –JGS ‘‘A visually assaultive threnody for losses never fully revealed and composed for monstrous times, LUNA E SANTUR mingles sex and death with the supernatural and subnaturalistic.’-Colin Beckett “Moon and sun are elliptically and stroboscopically conjured in Joshua Gen Solondz’s cloistered yet operatic Luna e Santur. In milky, hand-processed images, hooded figures recalling Magritte’s The Lovers enact a…

  • Whitewash

    “Whitewash” examines slavery in Canada and its omission from the national narrative. The country prides itself as being the benevolent refuge where enslaved Africans who were brought to United States gained their freedom via the Underground Railroad. That powerful image overshadows the fact that slavery was legal in Canada for over 200 years under both French and British rule. “Whitewash” brings to light some of the slave families that were brought to Prince Edward Island by Loyalists and looks at how nine generations of descendants have assimilated to the point of leaving very few visible traces of their origin.

  • Handsome & Majestic

    “Handsome & Majestic” follows the story of Milan Halikowski, a teenager from the rural city of Prince George, BC. As a recently transitioned transgender boy, Milan deals with discrimination and abuse from his peers and teachers at school, as he seeks to find other kids like himself. Throughout these hardships, he becomes a role model and an advocate for trans people in his small community and beyond. OutTV People’s Choice Award, Vancouver Queer Film Festival 2016