Film Categories: science/medicine

  • Observatory, The

    An ambient track of evening sounds accompanies rephotographed sketches of the night sky by Jerry Spevak. “The Observatory” turns the heavens on its head: the blackness of space becomes the white of the page, the stars and galaxies precise points of black graphite. The pages of Spevak’s sketchbook are animated to capture the rotation of and movement through a vast, spectacular universe. Selected screenings: Toronto International Film Festival, 2004; Best of the LIFT $99 No Excuses Film Festival, Toronto, 2004

  • Living Space

    “Living Space” is a film about the relationship between architecture and illness which follows the construction of a new cancer care centre designed by architect Frank Gehry. It traces the process of creating a space specially designed for people affected by cancer, a patient-centred approach which attempts to counter the alienating atmosphere of the hospital. This was Gehry’s first commission since the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao and his first building in the U.K.

  • Succubus

    Lilith, a cat-rescuing entrepreneur, and Athena, a genetic engineer, are desperately trying to have a baby together. Their attempts to conceive with the help of science have failed, so Lilith takes matters into her own hands, and uses her unique skill set to steal some very special sperm. That task turns out to be an easy one compared to convincing Athena it’s a good idea!

  • Sex Life of the Chair, The

    “The Sex Life of the Chair” treats the chair as a domesticated animal and develops a theory of its reproductive life to represent in animated drawings. Proposing that the human backside functions much like the airborne insect in plant pollination, the film integrates drawn studies of adolescent chair rotation with a sequence representing a chair’s sexual fantasy of witnessing a dancing pair of pink buttocks. The graphic style eschews the standards for children’s animation in favor of a pseudo-scientific accuracy and precision.

  • Parenthesis

    A simple inadvertent sequence of a few unassuming moments ends up feeling somehow sad and somehow beautiful. How this happens is hard to say. It has something to do with the interplay between what we can and cannot see, the incidental tensions underlying each small moment, the figures forming and reforming on the side.

  • Pictures of Things That Aren’t There

    “Pictures of Things That Aren’t There” is an anthology of six works loosely tied together by the circumstance of their making: all were initiated while Daniel was caring for her mother as she lived out her life with a disease that erodes the frontal and temporal lobes of the brain. Her mother’s illness is never more than peripherally addressed. Daniel attends instead to the unnoticed workings of the creative imagination – the capacity of mind she believed her mother had lost. They are small works, made for one person and offered to anyone else who cares to appreciate them. Aesthetic…

  • You Be Mother

    “You Be Mother” uses stop-frame animation to disrupt the traditional orders of animate and inanimate, the fluid and the solid. An hallucinatory space is set up when a frozen image of the artist’s face is projected onto weighty pieces of crockery atop a table. Ears, eyes, nose and mouth, all become spatially dislocated as a determined hand begins to reposition, decant and mix. Events unfold to the amplified sounds of grinding, pouring and stirring.

  • Portrait of a Couple

    A few days before moving to Spain, Ryan learns that he might be HIV positive. This situation will force him to deal with his boyfriend and his worse fear: loneliness. “Portrait of a couple” talks about the lack of trust between two lovers in a difficult moment. The dilemma is approached through the fear we all share of being sick and dying alone. The movie addresses the topic of a gay couple learning about their HIV status, from a particularly different perspective, not in a condescending or victimizing way, but allowing human nature to surface with all its flaws and…

  • Gendercator, The

    “The Gendercator” is a satirical take on surgical body modification and gender. The story uses the “Rip van Winkle” model to extrapolate from the feminist 1970s to a frightening 2048, where politics and technology have conspired to mandate two gender “choices”: macho male or Barbie babe. In this dystopian future, those whose gender presentation does not comply will be GENDERCATED.

  • Clean

    A brief look at one man’s obsession with cleanliness.