Film Categories: Portraits

  • In Cairo

    Exploring the reasons why people travel, RM Vaughan recounts his journey to Egypt in a series of slow, reverse dissolves that show the narrator standing, like a classic tourist, before the Pyramids of Giza and the Sphinx.

  • Crickets

    Sue, a 10-year-old Korean-Canadian, playfully pushes the limits until she finds herself in unexpected territory. “A bittersweet interracial romance between two prepubescent insect-lovers.” – Gemma Files, EYE Weekly Selected screenings & awards: Special Jury Prize, Yorkton Short Film & Video Festival. Screenings in over a dozen festivals, including the Toronto International Film Festival (1998); SXSW; and the New York, SF, Toronto, and LA Asian film festivals.

  • Paper, Scissors, Rock

    “Paper, Scissors, Rock” is the story of an unhappily married Korean woman who finds salvation in punk music after a breakdown.

  • close & low

    An ordinary dog effortlessly contains the most admirable human traits, much to the sorrow of one pathetic little man.

  • Going Back Home

    Turmoil of unsheltered childhood; the dwelling as self. “Louise Bourque’s ‘Going Back Home’ conveys a sense of loss and upheaval with just a few images.” – Steve Anker and Kathy Geritz, program notes, San Francisco International FIlm Festival, 2002 “The disasters of life can make it hard to go home. Bourque’s brief, beautiful, and affecting film goes by so quickly it’s printed twice on the reel, so you can get a second look.” – Program notes, Images Festival, 2001 “To the scratchy sounds of an old music box… ‘Going Back Home’ weaves snippets of old reels of houses collapsing, fires…

  • Jolicoeur Touriste

    An enclosed space, a struggle against the constraints of personal isolation explored through a fractured narrative. A man living in a broken-down rented room in a Tourist Inn travels through his inebriation, his memories and his fantasies, transcending the limits of time and space, which suddenly intertwine. A film about loss and absence. Selected screenings & awards: Best Experimental Short, Melbourne International Film Festival, Australia, 1990; Outstanding Achievement Award, Concordia University, Montreal, QC, 1989; Honorable Mention, The Canadian International Annual Film Festival, Ottawa, ON, 1990; Opening film, 39th International Mannheim Film Week, Germany, 1990

  • Imprint

    “Louise Bourque’s ‘Imprint’ focuses obsessively on home-movie images of her family’s house, which seems gloomily oppressive, almost filling the frame; she repeats the images with various alterations – tinted, bleached, partly scraped away – as if attacking the place, turning its darkness into light.” – Fred Camper, The Reader, Chicago, April 16 1999 “‘Imprint’… throttles and exhausts a particular memory-image (a family on a porch in an ambiguous position – good-bye/hello, reuniting/reinforcing/celebrating?) and traces its corrosion and dissolution even as it intensifies it physically. Dyes, zip-a-toning, a weird daguerrotype shiny effect, and ripping makes for a very concrete trip.” –…

  • People in the House, The

    “‘The People in the House’ examines the dynamics of a family in crisis and questions the role of religious devotion in the perpetuation of dysfunction. The exterior of the house is never seen, and the family’s anxiety, as is often the case, plays out within the confines of four walls. Filmed with a dreamy, surreal quality, ‘The People in the House’ dwells within the tension between harmony and chaos.” – Liz Czach, Toronto Film Festival Catalogue, Canada, 1995 Selected screenings & awards: Best Experimental Film, The 14th Uppsala Short Film Festival, Sweden, 1995; Special Jury Award, The 31st Yorkton Short…

  • Fissures

    A film about forgetting and remembering, about past presences and the traces they leave. In making this piece, Bourque literally distorted the personal home movie images appearing on the film plane through various manipulations in the process of doing her own low-tech contact printing. The images warp and fluctuate, creating a distorted space of fleeting apparitions, like re-surfacing memories. The footage was hand-processed and solarized as well as hand-coloured through toning. “A very short film that meshes the beautifully overlapping style of Bruce Baillie with rhythm and sound to create a meditation in blue.” – Stephen Brophy, artsMedia, March15 –…

  • Jours en fleurs

    “Jours en fleurs” is a reclamation of flower-power in which images of trees in springtime bloom are subjected to the floriferous ravages of menarcheal substance in a gestation of decay. The title is based on an expression from my coming-of-age in Acadian French Canada where girls would refer to having their menstrual periods as “être dans ses fleurs.” As a result of incubation in menstrual blood for several months, the original images inscribed on the emulsion undergo violent alterations. The shedding of the unfertilized womb depredates the fertilized blossoms and substitutes its own dark beauty. – LB “Those few shorts…