Film Categories: history

  • I’m Sorry, Sterling

    Poet RM Vaughan muses on his relationship to 50s film noir tough guy hunk Sterling Hayden, and why he cannot make his life more like a 50s film noir masterpiece. Created by video/internet artist Jared Mitchell, the film inserts Vaughan into the rain-dappled, shadowed and dreamy world of film noir – turning the poet into Hayden’s moll, lover, and dumb broad. A film about living your life “in the right movie,” queer projection onto mainstream cinema, and the collision of fantasy and reality.

  • wandering through secret storms

    In the not-so-distant future an old government archive is discovered. As workers sift through the files in an attempt to put them into context, a storm locked up since the past is unleashed. Thanks to the generous support of The Ontario Arts Council [Media Arts Section].

  • Stardust

    While others are quick to declare that film is dead, this film celebrates its dust and scratches, and its magic powers for time and space travel. It is an imaginary plea to preserve our dying celluloid past and to fight the takeover by digital technologies.

  • End, The

  • Spanish Tale, A

    The story of a family and their friend Paco who fled Spain after the Civil War and the threat of imprisonment under Franco’s regime. Told by an English voice-over of the grown daughter of the same family whose photo album we peruse as she recounts their harrowing escape to France and Montreal as a five year old child. The collision of cultures, the clash of beliefs, an idealist’s exile and how the shadow of the past interferes on subsequent events.

  • Michael Snow Up Close

    “MICHAEL SNOW UP CLOSE” was produced on the occasion of The Michael Snow Project, a major, career-spanning, multi-venue retrospective of the artist. The documentary celebrates the multi-faceted shape of Snow’s creative genius, including glimpses of his work in painting, sculpture, film, photo-works, performance, installations, and holography. Discussions with Snow, original documentation of his music and performance work, and excerpts from his avant-garde films, are complemented by interviews with filmmakers Jonas Mekas and Bruce Elder, Snow’s dealer Av Isaacs, the architect Eb Zeidler, museum director Pierre Théberge, curator Louise Dompierre, and others. A deliberately conventional documentary about a deliberately unconventional artist.

  • Grains of Salt

    “GRAINS OF SALT” provides an innovative perspective on the Holocaust. Holocaust survivors’ accounts of how talking about food helped cope with the incredible hunger are interwoven with their poignant stories about life in the concentration camps. We also see how, after being released from the camps, the memory of starvation affects their religious beliefs. The film contributes to our understanding of both past and present conditions where extreme food deprivation has severely impacted peoples’ lives both psychologically as well as physically.

  • Limits of What We Know, The

    In 1993, Amy Bodman took a small crew to Zimbabwe to make a film about land as a living entity. Quietly told through the voice of Zimbabweans, THE LIMITS OF WHAT WE KNOW documents the changing landscape of Zimbabwe and its people’s relationship to it. Part travel log, part environmental study and part meditation on life itself, the film reveals nature’s mysterious tenacity in the face of great change. Although the film initially appears to be a portrait of Zimbabwe, THE LIMITS OF WHAT WE KNOW culminates as a heart-felt picture of our changing world as it struggles to compensate…

  • Displaced View, The

    “The Displaced View” traces a personal search for identity and pride, within the unique and suppressed history of the Japanese in Canada. Through an examination of the emotional and cultural links between the women of one family, the processes of the construction of memory and the re-construction of history are revealed. Utilizing an innovative combination of experimental, dramatic and documentary forms, the film emerges as a deeply moving and compassionate love letter. Just as the official history of the Japanese Canadians has been thrown into question, so does the film’s fictionalized narrative question doumentary as truth.

  • Chip & Ovi

    Chip and Ovi met in an orphanage near the city of Kluj-Napoca in Romania during their teenage years. Ovi was born with disabilities in his arms and Chip has a severely damaged leg from polio. Both were abandoned shortly after birth to be raised in the care of the state. Despite their difficult situation, they dare to dream big: Chip wants to be an oilman in Texas and Ovi a professional cameraman. With humor and charm, they struggle to overcome their disabilities, social discrimination and poverty while dealing with the inevitable ups-and-downs of their relationship. “Featuring a complex, all-encompassing look…