Film Categories: Work about Women

  • Eye of the Mask

    “Eye of the Mask” reveals for Canadian audiences another view of life in Nicaragua. Set against the backdrop of the 1979 Sandinista revolution and the continuing contra attacks, many Nicaraguans were involved in the resurgence of popular theatre. It’s theatre based on both folkloric and experimental techniques. Judith Doyle and her crew focus on one of the most exciting and important of these theatre groups – Nixtayolero (Dawn Star) and its director, Alan Bolt. The film follows Nixtayolero as they travel to perform in remote, rural areas. Their work, and the response of their audiences, is juxtaposed with film of…

  • Learning To Milk A Cow

    When the filmmaker’s grandmother was 19, she was taken from Soviet Ukraine to Germany to work on a Bavarian farm under National Socialism. She had the luck and perseverance to survive hardships of the forced famine in her homeland and forced labour in the new one. The stories of her everyday life – learning how to milk a cow, falling in love – are interspersed with three generations of reflections on politics, longing, feelings of displacement and loss. Hand-processed black & white film, colour film, photographs and official documents create a montage of different perspectives. The hand-touch aesthetic combines with…

  • Fading Away

    For my family a way of life has faded away, even the memories are fading. I am left with fragments of stories, old photographs, and knick knacks. I never lived on that farm. I will never live there, except through the memories of others. (Elaine Pain)

  • Family Daycare: Through a New Lens

    This work grew organically out of the Family Daycare Education Project, a ten-month research and outreach project based at the Cabrillo College Early Childhood Education Department in Aptos, California. The tape includes extensive footage of children in family daycare situations, modelling use of home environments and good adult/child interaction. There are scenes from neighbourhood-based classes attended by providers, including one of Spanish-speaking providers in the Flats, Santa Cruz. Throughout the tape, providers speak for themselves – outlining the issues, needs and motivation. Nancy Andreasom, experienced educator and director of the project, speaks about the importance of recognizing and responding to…

  • Far Shore, The

    Set in 1918 Ontario. Eulalie, a Quebecoise, marries a Toronto engineer but finds life with him oppressive. She falls in love with Tom, a painter who is an acquaintance of her husband’s and, with him, escapes briefly to Northern Ontario before they are hunted down by her jealous husband. “For something like two decades, Joyce Wieland – the Toronto painter, filmmaker, quiltmaker and lay ecologist – has been creating an individual sensibility and then displaying it, piece by piece, in the various art forms that have suited her purposes. In ‘The Far Shore’, her feature film, she articulates that sensibility…

  • Fashion

    “In ‘Fashion’ the form-fitting, black-and-white striped dress, shot originally in video and re-filmed off the screen, doubly references popular culture, the sixties of the dress style, and its reinstitution in eighties’ Black Label ads. “The fashion of the title is not only that of clothing, surface, but the stuff of which we are fashioned, our formative contexts, submerged, internalized mindsets. Belying the flat surface are layers. Text voices one layer of desire, ‘I want to make myself a victim, to be passive,’ as image resists it. She lies on her back, fists clenched. We don’t always want what we desire.…

  • Sister Drag

    Sister Drag is a part of an ongoing work about the invisible labour of women; “I can’t hear the sound of your sewing machine anymore” is a tribute to my mother, grandmother and to all the women who suffer from a constant bad conscience for not being good enough.

  • Cum Pane

    It’s physically demanding and sweaty. Grandma’s hands are gnarled from years of pain and hard work. Hands knead the dough. She works with rolling-pins, brushes and older baking utensils. She deftly places the bread on a peel and sets it in the stone oven. Grandpa takes care of the wood-burning , watches over it, blows life into it, again and again. He moves the bread around on the hot hearth. They work noiselessly. Close to each other. Crackling and pounding, scratching and clouds of flour. It is hot. The fire blazes. The smell of wood. The aroma of freshly baked…

  • Between The Bullet and The Hole

    ‘Between the Bullet and the Hole’ is a film centred on the elusive and complex effects of war on women’s role in ballistic research and early computing. The film features new and archival high-speed bullet photography, schlieren and electric spark imagery, bullet sound wave imagery, forensic ballistic photography, slide rulers, punch cards, computer diagrams, and a soundtrack by Scanner. Like a frantic animation storyboard, it explores the flickering space between the frames, testing the perceptual mechanics of visual interpolation, the possibility of reading or deciphering the gap between before and after. Interpolation – the main task of the women studying…

  • Doorway for Natalie Kalmus

    ‘Doorway for Natalie Kalmus’ is a film centred around the use of colour in moving image technology, exploring the disorienting technicolour prismatic effects of the lamp house of a 35mm colour film printer. Through minute shifts across an abstract colour spectrum, punctuated by a mechanical soundtrack, the film evokes kaleidoscopic perceptual after-images (bringing to mind Paul Sharits, Dario Argento and the Wizard of Oz). Natalie Kalmus was the ex-wife of technicolour inventor Herbert Kalmus, and was the colour consultant for hundreds of colour films, including The Wizard of Oz, Gone with the Wind, the Red Shoes, Black Narcissus and many…