Film Categories: Literature

  • Outsiders, The

    “A super-short Super 8 remake camps up the Coppola classic. An obsession of mine, and a lot of other girls, this movie touched my sense of belonging at a time when I felt I had none – teenagehood. Years later, when tomboy-ish has matured into gender-bending queerness, 21 grown ‘girls’ play at ‘boyhood’. Done DIY style, with an ‘unknown’ all-star cast of girls, this film embodies both a music video style of fast cuts and silent film intertitles – a post-post-modern experiment of complicity and resistance.” – Juliana Saragosa Selected screenings: London Lesbian & Gay Film Festival (London, UK), 2006;…

  • Just Words

    “Using as it’s text Samuel Beckett’s ‘Not I,’ this shocking gift incorporates optically printed home movie footage and an eerily slick close-up of actress Patricia MacGeachy as she rants at lightening speed Beckett’s words about home, family and the confines and alienation associated with being a woman.” – Program notes, Madcat Film Festival, San Francisco, 2001 “A 10-minute tour de force […]. In ‘Just Words,’ Bourque intercuts footage of her mother and her sisters with a performance by actress Patricia MacGeachy of Samuel Beckett’s ‘Not I’; the result is unnerving (as all Beckett is) yet touching (as some Beckett is…

  • Cri du Silence, Le

    “Le Cri du Silence” follows Jean-Marc Dalpe step-by-step through his life and his experiences in Penetanguishene, Sudbury, Toronto, Rockland, Ottawa, and many more cities and villages. The film presents a portrait of the author and playwright, of this world and the Franco-Ontarian community. Dalpe’s poetry and plays reflect the conflicts, passions, and fears of those he has encountered. From Snoopy Dufour, the biker of the Amoco strike, to Therese Groleau, who inspired Dalpe’s play “Hawkesbury Blues,” “Le Cri du Silence” presents precious testimonies and stirs the memories of those who have felt the Dalpe effect so intensely. Note: French Language

  • Stars

    A rediscovered roll of super 8 film inspires the filmmaker to ponder friends that get lost with the passing of time. This bittersweet ode to friendship considers how someone can know all your secrets one year and somehow disappear from your life the next.

  • Neighbours Walk Softly

    “‘Neighbours Walk Softly’ is an anti-war protest poem, a test of the idea of neighbourhood, and a highlighting of the dividing lines we’re only too willing to fight to defend in the inevitable times of crisis. “This Super 8 and video footage was collected in an upscale Vancouver neighbourhood over the period of one year. The act of looking through a lens caused me to realize what wasn’t there to be seen – even though there weren’t any physical walls to keep out the poor and the less beautiful, somehow they were missing from the footage I collected. “The familiar…

  • 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.

  • 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…

  • 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.

  • 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