Film Categories: Work about Women

  • Shut Up Barbie

    The film is a reaction to the obsession a seven-year-old girl has with her many Barbie Dolls. The world of Barbie is pushed to its innocuous and tragic conclusions. Ann Knutson plays the role of the mother. “Shut Up Barbie” was pixilated in Tiburon, Ca.

  • Berlin Zoo

    The footage for “Berlin Zoo” was taken in Germany while I was travelling there in the winter of 2003. This is an anecdotal film, set to an original song by the filmmaker.

  • Pepere’s Chairs

    The story of Pepere’s Chairs was conceived by my mother, visual artist Maryse Maynard. It is a playful tale about a group of chairs that once belonged to her ancestors. Once the film had been recorded and edited, it was projected onto hand-embroidered canvases which served as the screen. Maryse had embroidered the canvases with chairs, and every once in a while, an embroidered chair could be glimpsed floating in the background of the film.

  • Outsiders, The

    “A super-short Super 8 remake camps up the Coppola classic. An obsession of mine, and a lot of other girls, this movie touched my sense of belonging at a time when I felt I had none – teenagehood. Years later, when tomboy-ish has matured into gender-bending queerness, 21 grown ‘girls’ play at ‘boyhood’. Done DIY style, with an ‘unknown’ all-star cast of girls, this film embodies both a music video style of fast cuts and silent film intertitles – a post-post-modern experiment of complicity and resistance.” – Juliana Saragosa Selected screenings: London Lesbian & Gay Film Festival (London, UK), 2006;…

  • They Dance Alone

    A look back on half my life ago, who I wanted to be. Love and longing – lost friendship, belonging, the fear of touch, a magical embrace, a spell to dispel. Hands become a moment of realization – an intense feeling like no other – you realize you love her, but can never have her.

  • Current

    “The conceptual and minimalist aesthetic seen in this film refers to the more complex metaphysical and alchemical transformations which occur when silver is exposed to tungsten light. These currents of light, like Daniel Burren’s striped conceptual art, refer to the basic nature of representation while attempting to resist and transform traditional viewing habits or consumption. ‘Current’ is a beautiful meditation on these realities.” – Maria Insell

  • Pink Fairy, The

    A long process of experimentation with a variety of different filmmaking techniques while examining an evolving queer identity. The film shows an emergence of the Pink Fairy. Part femme, part tomboy, part fairy, the characters come together to subvert the idea of a fixed identity. Luminscent imagery is imprinted by hand using hand-processed colour footage, optically printing super8 to 16mm, 16mm to 16mm, negative to positive, video to film, and repeating motifs, to explore the intricacies of the celluloid medium. Audio emotes through random manipulations in a Brion Gysin-like cut-up technique.

  • Role I Was Born To Play, The

    Using borrowed clips from three films about gender bending – two comedies and a tragedy – a personal gender landscape is created. This piece touches on the assumptions, strategies for survival and a the commitment to discussion that alternate gender expressions evoke.

  • Monsoon St., ‘77

    Monsoon St., ’77 tells the story of a day in the life of a young tomboy, Tina, who finds escapism in the rural desert of Arizona in 1977. To compensate for her unhappy surroundings, Tina lives in a rich imaginative world. She finds beauty in the natural landscape and comforts herself by summoning familiar figures from popular culture. These fantasies supply the happiness that is otherwise so lacking in her everyday life.

  • Behind the Walls and Under the Stairs

    The spiders are organizing themselves…one day soon they’ll take over. “Phantasmic photograms crawl across the emulsion, their flow arrested via re-photography, these marks look like multi-hued spiders crawling towards a new berth. Again and again. Falling from the horizon of the frame line in warm hues of red and purple and brown. A movie of theme and variations, noting the small changes of tone and texture and opacity. Every day I don’t have a new best friend, a new job, a new home. I live within the frame, trying to find freedom in my restrictions, my life.” – Mike Hoolboom,…