Film Categories: Work about Women

  • 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.

  • Menses

    A wry comedy on the disagreeable aspects of menstruation. Women act out their own dramas on a California hillside, in a supermarket, in a red-filtered ritual of mutual bonding. “Menses” combines both the imagery and the politics of menstruation in a fine blend of comedy and drama.

  • Mercy

    “Voyeurism, eroticism, violence and pornography are challengingly jumbled together: the result is a mixture of fluttery pictures which cloud what is real and what is not, making the questions that these films provoke all the more disturbing.” – Jane Headon, City Limits “‘Mercy’ shows no mercy as it dissects the games mass media play with our perceptions. It blends found footage, images and sounds into a flow that’s as revealing as it is overwhelming.” – New York Festival Catalogue

  • midst

    “In ‘midst’, Barbara Sternberg has made a lyrical film about attachment, integration, belonging. Many of the familiar elements of Sternberg’s work are here: speed, pulsing rhythms, explosions of colour, light and shape, images of nature and the built environment. But the conflicted situations and turmoil of earlier major films like ‘Through and Through’ and ‘Beating’ are gone. Instead, ‘midst’ focuses dramatically on an understanding of the world through art, specifically painting, especially abstraction, here translated into filmic terms. Abstraction becomes the vehicle for taking on complexity, putting it all together in heightened moments of intense vision characteristic of ‘seeing into’…

  • Migraine

    The severe pain inflicted during a migraine attack alters the vision of the sufferer often to the point of hallucination. The optical symptoms of this disorder open it up for expressive filmic interpretation. A jumpy and fractured roller-coaster montage is transformed into the comically tortured hallucinations of a migraine sufferer as she loses control of her vision and mental faculties.

  • Across

    “Across” is about the sometimes difficult journey from one psychic space to another. From a place in the abusive past, to a place called survival.” – Liz Czach, Toronto International Film Festival “Across” has a gentler power, furiously and passionately engaging with the unobtrusive landscape to uncover what most of us have yet to discover.” – Take One, Fall 1997

  • Art of Conversation, The

    Jack Stone is bright yellow and fairly cheerful about it, all things considered. He has terminal liver cancer and must spend his last month on earth in a hospital. Family, friends, and total strangers surround Jack’s bedside to engage him in meaningful conversation while Jack’s wife tries to fend off the visiting intruders. The film is a humorous and pointed examination of “conversations” in the face of death.

  • Minomen Harvest

    “Minomen Harvest” is a documentary of the traditional native method of harvesting wild rice which takes place outside the town of Ardock in Ontario. The August harvest begins with cutting the wild rice by hand, then the drying and winowing. No mechanization is used throughout the entire process. The film ends with a sunrise ceremony that honours Mother Earth, the creator of wild rice.

  • Mirage

    Typical imagery of a naughty wahine dancing while removing her sarong is looped and superimposed on images associated with Hawaii such as fish, surfers, volcanoes and the Kodak Hula Show. The sound is a loop from the Elvis song “Dreams Come True in Blue Hawaii” and the effect is haunting with a touch of humor. The juxtaposition of these three elements parodies a travel film enticing one to the islands by associating sensuality and sexuality with everything from Kahunas to Pearl Harbor. It is a kind of pop, twisted mantra invoking an exotic space that perhaps only exists in a…

  • MM Myth Myth-A Collage

    An animated film exploring the myth of Marilyn Monroe. Amusing and sad. “One of the most remarkable and dedicated amateur filmmakers in the world…” – Movie Maker 10 Best, 1986