Film Categories: Portraits

  • Ley Lines

    “Taking her own last name as her primary organizing principle in approaching the past, Patricia Gruben has constructed one of the most inventive personal archeologies and family histories ever filmed. Over six years in the making, ‘Ley Lines’ eschews conventional narrative storytelling in favour of associative and cumulative revelation… “Gruben criss-crosses the globe as she traces the Gruben family back to Texas and then to Germany, only to end up in the present in Tuktoyaktuk. Her magical and unpredictable exploration makes innumerable stops along the way to consider such matter as satellites, DNA, geomancy, dowsing, Jimmy Dean, Hitler, the Thule…

  • Life Force

    “Life Force” is a documentary on the life of the late Canadian artist Jack Chambers. It is a film that interweaves art and reality, recreating the significant moments in the artist’s life. Like Chambers’ own work, it is about the universal themes of life, death and transcendence.

  • LOVERFILM – eine unkontrollierte Freisetzung von Information | LOVERFILM – An Uncontrolled Dispersio

    “Blurring the line between friends, lovers and maybe even complete strangers, Brynntrup presents a video catalogue of his brushes with intimacy, intercut with grainy stills and retro porn.” – Inside Out Lesbian & Gay Film & Video Festival, Toronto 1998

  • Archaeology of Memory (silent)

    Beginning in scratches of light, this film evolves through colour, rhythm and multiple images tracing a history of cinema from mythical beginnings to the thread of personal memory, peering into the everyday pathology of family, sex and death. “A kind of double history that intertwines autobiography with the development of cinema, it’s a stunning, enormously seductive array of images …” – Cameron Bailey, NOW Magazine

  • Archaeology of Memory (sound)

    Beginning in scratches of light, this film evolves through colour, rhythm and multiple images tracing a history of cinema from mythical beginnings to the thread of personal memory, peering into the everyday pathology of family, sex and death. “A kind of double history that intertwines autobiography with the development of cinema, it’s a stunning, enormously seductive array of images …” – Cameron Bailey, NOW Magazine

  • Man Who Could Not See Far Enough, The

    “The Man Who Could Not See Far Enough” uses literary, structural, autobiographical and performance metaphors to construct a series of tableaux that evoke the act of vision, the limits of perception and the rapture of space. Spectacular moving multiple images; a physical, almost choreographic sense of camera movement; and massive, resonant sound have inspired critics to call it “stunning” and “hallucinatory.” The film ranges in subject from a solar eclipse shot off the coast of Africa to a hand-held filmed ascent of the Golden Gate Bridge, and moves, in spirit, from the deeply personal to the mythic. “…miraculous… charged with…

  • Mary Mary

    Presented as an autobiography, “Mary Mary” interweaves the political with the mythical; visual and textual “quotes” from other films with fragments of children’s stories; and dreams and memories with history. “M” is an ambiguous figure: an English-Canadian woman filmmaker struggling with the representational structures that form and are formed by her as she tries to make a film. At first her script eludes her. Locked in her room, she becomes tangled in a web of memories, images and stories, quotations and histories. Yet even within these confines (narrative and psychic, as well as architectural) the possibility of new readings is…

  • Me, Mom and Mona

    The women of the Shum family are a force to be reckoned with. Sitting around joking about how they pull the wool over Dad’s eyes, or remembering all the absurdities of growing up Chinese in Vancouver, it’s clear they’ve hit on a strategy that can handle both Chinese tradition and Canadian custom – humour. The laughter resonates throughout “Me, Mom and Mona” to touch off much deeper responses.

  • Moffie Called Simon, A

    “A Moffie Called Simon” is a collage of photographs, letters, TV footage and dramatic sequences presenting the case of Simon Nkodi, a black gay activist and student leader in South Africa, who has been in jail for nearly two years. Based on letters from Nkodi and his lover, Ray, a Canadian gay journalist, “A Moffie Called Simon” also explores connections between anti-apartheid struggles and gay liberation.

  • Mondo Punk

    In the beginning were the Sex Pistols. All the ikons of the Punk Movement and more. Anarchistic anti-art calculated to offend. “It’s violent… it scared the shit out of me a couple of times.” – Freddy Pompeii, The Viletones