Film Categories: Work about Women

  • Sister

    In the attempt to find out how and why her sister died, a young woman discovers her sexuality. How her desire for women is held prisoner in the mourning and mystery surrounding her sister’s suicide. With a nod to the youthful fetish films of Anger and the J.D’s, scenes which begin light and fun with mod girls out on an adventure, grow dense and wet as sexual longing fulminates.

  • Beating

    “Beating” – to get beaten or give a beating, to beat oneself up. To beat the odds. Metal is forged by beating. Birds beat their wings, the sun beats down, and our hearts… “Beating” exists in the area of boundaries. I work with images as they can be registered between abstraction and representation, between blurred and defined, between the formless and the formed – in-between, in motion. I try to render images suggestively, bodily and to use vocalizations and words for texture as well as information. (BS) “Water, like fire, is a dimension of the carnival insisting on the stateless…

  • Skin Flick

    As a textual surface, skin becomes the privileged vehicle for the representation of history. A site from which culture defines spatial concepts of containment and exclusion, the marked skin is the point of entry for an analysis of institutions, economic processes and ethical systems. A metaphor for external boundaries, the tattoo traces an architectural system of social discipline applicable to prisons, factories, schools, warehouses: all the places that operate on principles of isolation and surveillance.

  • Slow Dance World

    In Hindu mythology, dance represents the rhythm of life and Shiva – god of creative and destructive forces- is master of the dance. As Shiva imagines the creation of the world in his mind’s eye, the forms, the textures and movements found in air, earth and water are revealed. Satisfied with his plan, Shiva brings the world into being and in the end is united with his creation. This film was created by animating three-dimensional objects on a colour photocopier.

  • Small Pleasures

    “Small Pleasures” is the first Chinese-Canadian feature film made by a Chinese-Canadian. It is about two young women from Beijing studying in Toronto, who experience life in the West during the Tiananmen Square student demonstrations in 1989.

  • Snow Search

    “Snow Search” finds four performers searching for each other, each carrying one quarter of a photographic portrait of Michael Snow. A lyrical exploration through the city and an homage to Michael Snow.

  • So Far So

    A pencil portrait of the artist as a young woman. My Boyfriend Gave Me Peaches: Fleming utilizes her quirky, elegantly minimalistic style to superb effect in this film, a humorously nasty teenage girls’ ditty about a mean boyfriend who gets bumped down the stairs and carted off in an ambulance. I Love My Work: In the faux-naif stick-figure animation Fleming describes the plight of the modern woman who insists on trying to get to work, despite horoscope warnings that she should stay at home.

  • Solidarity

    A film on the Dare strike of the early 1970s. Hundreds of feet and legs, milling, marching and picketing with the word “solidarity” superimposed on the screen. The soundtrack is an organizer’s speech on the labour situation. Like her films “Rat Life and Diet in North America,” “Pierre Vallieres” and “Reason Over Passion,” “Solidarity” combines a political awareness, an aesthetic viewpoint and a sense of humour unique in Wieland’s work. Image description: Plain black laced shoes and bare or white-stockinged ankles of a person standing on green grass, a metal-tipped umbrella at their side. White text superimposed over the middle…

  • Bed and Sofa

    A remake of Abram Room’s 1927 silent Russian feature, “Bed and Sofa”. Heralded as a revolutionary feminist film, Room’s version was suppressed for its radical treatment of sexual freedom, women’s rights, and abortion. Armatage’s version shifts the emphasis to the woman’s point of view and stylizes the narrative. A comedy.

  • space

    “Something to be holdin, to you: something too beholden to you.” A concrete poem made as a very blue Super 8 film experiment about: “I need a little space.” It’s all the things she never said as she visits the haunts of their urban love and remembers what happened in the Fall.