Film Categories: Portraits

  • Rx

    A young gay man in a tiny Toronto apartment experiences a nervous breakdown, causing him to obsessively arrange and re-arrange his large knick-knack collection. Based on a true story, “Rx” is a bittersweet, funny chronicle of a mind turned frantic by fear, worry and novelty paperweights.

  • Attack of the Naïve: Ages Four to Twenty-One in Thirteen Unlucky Vignettes

    A confessional documentary on the artist’s schooling in love from the cradle to the crib. Scenes from movies, television shows and commercials are processed through analogue video techniques to yield a pop-art sensible understanding of the North-American Love Experience.

  • Gloriously Free

    “Gloriously Free” is one of the first documentaries to explore the world of gay immigration, and the desperate search of five young men to find welcoming arms outside their countries of birth – where persecution and hatred of alternative lifestyles may lead to torture or death. What they find is Canada, leading the world as the safest haven for persecuted gays and lesbians. “Gloriously Free” is a powerful profile of gay immigrants to Canada. Among them are Al-Hussein from Jordan; Julian, blackmailed and blacklisted in his homeland of Mexico and a resident of Canada for three years; Bruno, who immigrated…

  • you wash my skin with sunshine

    With few childhood memories of her mother’s affection, Mullen mines old home movies for evidence. When she doesn’t find exactly what she’s looking for, she sets out to create a new family movie of her own, starring her surprisingly willing mother. A reflection on memory, loss, reconciliation and love.

  • Finite, The

    “The Finite” lays bare the ephemeral nature of family, home and life on earth through a combination of home movies and archival footage from a science documentary. The two forms of imagery entwine along a common and inescapable course toward destruction, revealing the gravity of personal loss. Selected screenings: Toronto International Film Festival, 2004; CFC Worldwide Short Film Festival, 2006

  • Hollywood Forever

    Using the Hollywood Forever cemetary as a backdrop (the cemetary that figures prominently in Kenneth Anger’s “Hollywood Babylon”), the filmmaker recounts his visit to Outfest, LA’s big queer film fest. Pigeons sit on grandiose monuments, flying down to snack, as Hollings talks about the perks of visiting an LA film festival as an experimental filmmaker – especially the free drinks and all-you-can-eat buffets.

  • Miracle

    The risks and complications of postponing pregnancy are the starting point for this 36-year-old’s anxious journey down the long road to reproduction. In seven jam-packed minutes, our intrepid filmmaker falls in love, struggles with infertility, gets pregnant, worries about miscarriage, takes a holiday, tries to be a good pregnant person and inevitably goes into labour. Be prepared for an emotional rollercoaster ride in the lo-fi, heartfelt, high stakes tale of the miracle of life.

  • Coconut/Cane & Cutlass

    The title of “Coconut/Cane & Cutlass” represents the psyche behind the collective memory, history and imagination of Indo-Caribbean people. The film is a mythic/poetic rumination on exile, displacement, and nationhood from the perspective of an Indo-Caribbean lesbian who migrated to Canada twenty years ago. Intersections of the autobiographical voice (in the realm of mythic/memory and the personal) co-mingle with the historical, to produce a film that is neither an “official historical document” nor a “personal history.” Instead, “Coconut/Cane & Cutlass” is a hybrid fusion of the autobiographical, historical and experiential, in an episodic structure that is richly textured and layered…

  • Liselda’s Birthday

    The death of her friend Corin spurs Liselda, a trans MTF, to recall her existence in Mexico. Her quest is to gain legal refugee status in order to obtain a sex change operation, acceptance and happiness in her adopted home of Toronto. In Spanish and English with English subtitles. Selected screenings: Inside Out Lesbian & Gay Film & Video Festival, Toronto, 2005; AluCine Latino Film & Video Festival, Toronto, 2005

  • Boy

    The visual poetics of Vancouver are brought to light as the filmmaker reflects on the cities she has lived in, motherhood and the birth of her first son. Image description: A blurry and rain-soaked streetscape as viewed through a car windshield.