Film Categories: Work about Women

  • Orientation Express, The

    By animating three decades of LIFE Magazine, “The Orientation Express” humorously guides us through the sexism of North American media. Hosts such as The Quaker Oats Man, Colonel Sanders, and The Kool Aid Jug explore “the feminine mystique.” This film highlights how attitudes towards women have changed and works to eliminate stereotypes which still persist today. “A technically polished animated film…devoted to an amusingly didactic re-expose of the horrors of sexual stereotyping, circa 1950.” – The Globe and Mail

  • Our Trip

    “Feminist filmmaker and performance artist Barbara Hammer has celebrated her recent trip to Peru with her friend Corky Wick through a diaristic animation of photographs they took during their travels. Landscapes and portraits are given growing patterns of framing and texture with magic markers and tempera paint, expressing the richly evocative folk art of the Incan people they saw as we hear their native music resonate on the soundtrack.” – Anthony Reveaux

  • Parcelle

    The French term “parcelle” refers to a fragment, particle or bit. Filmed frame-by-frame in the camera, the film rests upon the alternate appearance and duration of tiny coloured squares and circles placed on a black background. Inserted in series between plain white or coloured frames, the particular arrangement of the items on separate frames forms, when projected on the screen, certain visual relationships producing a specific perceptual experience.

  • passages

    The entire film takes place in one space – a room of which we see only one wall, upon which is the moving shadow of a tree being blown by the wind. In the window we see images, which act both as mirrors reflecting back what is happening inside the room, and as glass, allowing us to see what is happening outside the room. The film is divided into four sections plus an introduction with each section separated by a slow zoom in towards the window, drawing us through the successive levels of life and existence of the space of…

  • Passion Crucified

    “Passion Crucified” is an episodic rite of passage rendered in tableau style. Part creation myth, part medieval science fiction, it enacts a typology of the body – offering us glimpses of Adam, Eve, Christ and Joan of Arc. Together they are figured as subterranean ideals, which continue to haunt us, even as they provide the means by which we might come to understand our own bodies. Begun as a dance performance, Torossian recasts her naked charge into a series of phantasmagoric settings – trees whose fruit show the faces of Medici children, drunken underground rooms filled with a rotting, natural…

  • Passion: A Letter in 16mm

    “Passion: A Letter in 16mm” is the story of a woman with too much passion and too little time. Linda Griffiths portrays a woman struggling to balance her craving for professional excellence as a documentary filmmaker with her need for intimacy. The first film by the award-winning director of “I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing.”

  • Past History

    Adventure, romance, politics and exile are themes in this unique combination of live action, archival photographs, and animation. Stories of people long ago and far away are brought to life, tracing a history of the effects of progress and development in Latin America on past and present generations.

  • PATH

    Employing a simple three-part structure, “PATH” is about personal experience and the interpretation of that experience. Both humorous and serious, the film is a cross-Toronto exploration, expansively taking in a wide variety of people, events and situations. In creating a dynamic web of associations, “PATH” invites participation in the act of perception. The film’s structure works like this: Davis is filmed connecting dots on a street map; next she walks that distance on the street, filming as she goes; then she recalls and interprets what she has seen in memory sequences. The street sequences have a variety of different rhythms…

  • Patriotism 1

    Wieland’s kinetic romp casts David Shackman as an overexposed sleeper dogged by a patriotic march of tube steaks that finally refigures him as our most familiar icon of freedom. This pixillated short about hot dogs is the latest of Wieland’s early film works to be restored to circulation.

  • Ay Que Pelos!

    “Ay Que Pelos!” is a hand-processed experimental film about anxiety disorders and panic attack syndrome. This bilingual film (interweaving English and Spanish) incorporates personal experiences, family history, case studies and medical texts, and uses these to examine the perception and (mis)understanding of the disease. The film is visually structured to reflect and invoke the experience of panic attack.