Film Categories: history

  • Vesta Lunch (Cookin’ at the Vesta)

    A continuous-take, cinema-verité study of Toronto’s famous all-night diner. A film that studies the pulse of the after-hours urban environment, in real time.

  • What Wants To Be Spoken, What Remains To Be Said

    What Wants To Be Spoken, What Remains To Be Said uses an imaginative and lyrical narrative to interweave three stories: The Canadian Legend of Marguerite de Roberval; the daily life of an unknown pioneer woman; and the versions of these histories as presented by a museum tour guide. In representing what has been lost, What Wants To Be Spoken, What Remains To Be Said seeks to affirm a place in history for women and acknowledges the act of the imagination in the mediation of the past. What Wants To Be Spoken, What Remains To Be Said is produced and directed…

  • Where Is Memory

    “Part fictional narrative, part travelogue, part documentary, this unusual film serves as another sign that non-fiction film as we know it is going through a major revolution. Engaging fictional narrative elements to create a ‘mystery,’ ‘Where Is Memory’ is a boldly original and affecting meditation on the nature of complicity and the Third Reich. Masterful use of archival footage matched with contemporary footage of Europe, a haunting score and an inspired mix of realities for a thoughtfully framed poetic odyssey that charts new cinematic territory.” – Judges’ Award, Northwest International Film Festival “Mixing narrative with archival and new footage, ‘Where…

  • 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…

  • Human Remains

    “Human Remains” illustrates the banality of evil by creating intimate portraits of five of this century’s most reviled dictators: Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Joseph Stalin, Francisco Franco, and Mao Tse Tung. We learn the private and mundane details of their everyday lives – their favourite foods, films, habits, and sexual preferences. Their personalities and psychological make-up are revealed through the details they convey. There is no mention of their public lives or of their place in history. The intentional omission of the horrors for which these men were responsible hovers over the film. “Human Remains” addresses this horror from a…

  • Book of Knives

    “Book of Knives” is based on seven psychiatric case histories dating from 1905 up to the present. These stories are linked through the interrogation of a modern day woman, Iris, who has murdered her plastic surgeon. “Book of Knives” is a short history of women, technology & madness in the twentieth century, and calls into question both the ethics and methodologies of western scientific enquiry.

  • 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…

  • Our Hiroshima

    Setsuko Nakamura Thurlow, a relentless campaigner for peace, sets the tone of “Our Hiroshima”. She was thirteen when the first atomic bomb destroyed her city and killed several members of her family. By interspersing Setsuko’s vivid, eyewitness testimony with archival footage from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Anton Wagner brings alive the reality of an unimaginable horror. This film also takes a long look at the US Army’s determination to test the new weapon before the end of the war, and delves deeply into the essential roles played by the Canadian government, uranium industry, and scientists in the Manhattan Project. In the…

  • Contrafacta

    Contrafacta is a collage animation made by Toronto filmmakers Roberto Ariganello and Chris Gehman. Using images from medieval artworks, and quotations from the writings of medieval mystics and poets, Contrafacta creates a web of related images and events without a simple connective narrative. “This painstakingly crafted medievalist tale… conjure[s] a dreamland of floating royals and waltzing unicorns. Birth, death, plague and the farming of souls all rub shoulders in this episodic surrealist fable. In a dance of grace and punishment where miracles are commonplace, we follow the descent of a royal egg which hatches the changing shape of the world.”…

  • 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…