Film Categories: Literary/theatre

  • Almost Forgot My Bones

    A lyrical video-poem which depicts the transformation of an African-Canadian woman’s identity as she goes in search of her roots. In order to find herself she must travel past skin into bone – to the root, the secret inside identity. Almost forgot my bones In this home without no mirrors Almost forgot my bones In this home without no mirrors Of myself, my skin, my kin, my hidden Of myself, my skin, my kin, my hidden

  • Green

    “My first foray into collage animation uses low-fi techniques, such as a photocopier, to illustrate a story in limerick form. The limericks tell of a place where creativity is suppressed and all acts of resistance are covered over with white paint. It also illustrates a character who displays an open sexuality, both queer and polyamorous. The DIY aesthetic calls up notions of subversion of the dominant culture through its ues of low-tech and hand-made traces.” – Juliana Saragosa Selected screenings: Splice This! Super 8 Film Festival, Toronto, 2004

  • Paradise Lost

    A poetic assembly of 1950s’ and 1960s’ Soviet film print fragments and graphic text that elicits a romantic tale of an individual’s fall from grace.

  • Clinton Special: A Film About the Farm Show, The

    The summer of 1972: the Theatre Passe Muraille Company moves into the farming community of Clinton, Ontario, and makes a play out of the stories and events of the people of that region. The following spring, the company takes its play, “The Farm Show,” on a tour of the farming communities of southwestern Ontario, sometimes performing in auction barns and town halls. “The Clinton Special” is a documentary of the tour and includes scenes from the play.

  • Trains of Winnipeg – 14 Film Poems (Feature Length)

    “Idiosyncratic, independent and supremely inventive… One of the finest non-narrative movies ever made in this country.” – Jason Anderson, Eye Weekly GertJan Zuilhof, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Jan. 2005: “A visually opulent, almost hypnotic film, for which the word poetic really is justified for a change. This hybrid film is made up of fourteen film poems, each of which has the character of an individual short film, but in tone and approach they are all clearly related. Without a doubt, the film fits into the tradition of the experimental film, but it also has an epic quality rare within this…

  • 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…