Film Categories: Portraits

  • Dead Horse Point

    “Dead Horse Point” is a film that expresses my feelings of ambivalence for the western genre, and America as a nation. It essentially deals with the notion of “the old west,” “the frontier,” the blurred line between historical fact and myth, the role of Hollywood in the historical process, the importance of celebrity in America, and finally the influence that the western landscape has had in defining the mythology of “the old west.”

  • Memory Worked By Mirrors

    A mirror in the filmmaker’s backyard reflects his childhood home. The black frame of the watermarked mirror becomes a mysterious portal, distorting brick, branch, and flesh into an amorphous hodgepodge. A self-portrait.

  • Videos with Mom

    “Breast” (3:25 min.) “Follow” (5:46 min.) “Haircut” (2:46 min.) “Passing” (8:12 min.) Originally I’d been working on a larger project dealing with the exploration of subjective self through intimate relationships: my mother and two ex-girlfriends. My mother was willing to cooperate. We shot “experiments”, “tests”, and “games” throughout the fall, winter, and spring semesters. I screened the footage and it played well. The absent ex-girlfriend sections atrophied. Out they went! I designed rules and scenarios, tested the ones that magnified my relationship with my mother. I did my best to think of each experiment as “What happens if I…” rather…

  • Man That Got Away, The

    A musical documentary that tells the true life story of Trevor’s great-uncle Jimmy in six original songs.

  • Akin

    “Akin” marks the first creative collaboration between Toronto-based artist Chase Joynt (Everyday to Stay) and NYC-based filmmaker Brooke Sebold (Red Without Blue). With haunting suburban visuals backed by the rich sounds of Toronto based-band Ohbijou, “Akin” powerfully engages in a relationship between an Orthodox Jewish mother and her transgender son as they navigate silent secrets of a shared past. Hauntingly beautiful. Rarely have I watched a film that is such a perfect union of parsimony and punch. It left me breathless. – Michelle Stone Perfectly timed and sequenced, “Akin” is so resolutely personal in it’s detailing. Joynt points to a…

  • Transforming FAMILY

    “Transforming FAMILY” jumps directly into an ongoing conversation among trans people about parenting. It’s a beautiful snapshot of current issues, struggles and strengths of transexual, transgender and gender fluid parents (and parents-to-be) in North American society today.

  • her silent life

    A version of family. From mother, grandmother, great-grandmother to me, stories flow through our matrilineal heritage to explore the remarkable life of my Inuk great-grandmother.

  • Hawker, The

    “When I was a kid in Singapore, the same person served me chicken rice every day. I didn’t know if that person was a man or a woman, and that was awesome.”

  • though she never spoke, this is where her voice would have been.

    An autotopographical portrait of someone through what was left behind and what is missing.

  • Lecciones en Proceso (Lessons in Process)

    “Lessons in Process” is a poetic documentary about a film making workshop given by Canadian filmmaker Philip Hoffman at the famed Escuela Internacional de Cine y Televisión de San Antonio de los Baños in Cuba. Founded in 1986 by Argentinean poet and filmmaker Fernando Birri, Colombian writer Gabriel García Marquez and Cuban filmmakers Julio Garcia Espinosa, and Thomas Gutirres Alea, “the school of the three worlds” was established to give students from developing countries in Latin America and the Carribean, Africa and Asia, an opportunity to participate in the democracy of the image. Hoffman collaborates with the students to produce…