Film Categories: Portraits

  • darg: construction

    A day’s work. A construction site in Montréal.

  • The Island

    A garden between Oakland and Berkley where its inhabitants, marginalized by gentrification, plant fruit trees and flowers to pay homage to their loved ones who died in battles against poverty. This is a space of love and freedom cared by Brian for the last 25 years. The island resists, as a living legacy of the Black Panthers who were the first to organize the neighbourhood.

  • My Life in Dance

    A romp across the filmmaker’s dance floor of life. A personal reflection on film, dance and living queer.

  • Room 11a, Ortona Armoury

    The studio workings behind door 11a in the Ortona Armoury prior to a renoviction. An ode to a practice and place that should not be forgotten. Image description: A series of black-and-white film strips superimposed over each other form vertical bands. The rectangular sprocket holes are a strong graphic. The only clearly identifiable image is a woman’s head which is upside down and visible twice.

  • trash heaven

    Maisie (14) and Kohe (6) talk about the work of their dad, Chad Baba, an artist, junk repurposer, local Edmonton treasure and awesome dad.

  • where no one knew her name.

    Remnants of a life left behind. One of five components of a larger project, Bloodline.

  • bernard gaspé

    Rendered in a dream-like pink hue, bernard gaspé uses layered in-camera juxtapositions to present a journey through the neglected architecture of the tracks in Montréal’s Mile End.

  • Vanilla

    Vanilla takes you through the everyday ordinary life of a disabled senior citizen living in Ottawa, Canada. It is a portrait documenting aging and the loneliness of those suffering in silence. The black and white film was shot on 16mm Bolex film camera using a KODAK 7222 Double-X Negative film. Processed by Niagara Film Lab (Toronto). Created as part of Independent Filmmakers Co-operative of Ottawa (IFCO) – Dogme Production Challenge.

  • ARTIFACT (circa 2006)

    The archaeology of Identity. Consider a world where all human communications are represented by numbers, a digital world. Imagine a future archaeologist finding a DV cassette from hundreds of years ago (a real found object, circa 2006, full length and uncut). Imagine trying to decode this ancient digital object, codecs unknown, obsolete, hardware long lost. Crack the code? Available algorithms scan, databases compare, construct, deconstruct, reconstruct the artifact. 2006, the dawn of self-by-numbers, digitized identity. What human fragments, fugitive narratives, remain? Do we have a future history? What will the algorithms decide? All bookings of this film include a free…

  • Fresh Blood: A Consideration of Belonging

    “Fresh Blood” is a hybrid documentary blending personal narrative and a video-essay style. The piece engages issues of Jewish racialized identity, Arab/Jewish dichotomies and the ways these come together in Iraqi Jewish culture, and the personal implications of the politics of Palestine and of the Jewish holocaust. The artist returns to a land of remembering and forgetting. With her first language lost it is difficult to communicate with her grandmother, and yet there is humour and poignancy in their resulting exchanges. In seeking out her biological father, Yael questions the significance of blood relations. She revisits and revises family memory…