Film Categories: Work by Women

  • Amateur Dramatics

    Two competing actors find truth in pretending.

  • When I See You

    Tired of putting her girlfriend ahead of her stifled dance career, Kira accepts an opportunity to be a featured dancer in New York City. But when her zealous girlfriend, Bea, unexpectedly opposes the change, Kira must hastily choose between her relationship or her career. Resentment and loyalty collide as Kira and Bea discover what they’re willing to sacrifice for their careers and not for each other.

  • Cross Examination

    A short film by Lori Hiris about the Clarence A. Thomas-Anita F. Hill hearings. The camera remains fixed on the eyes of a black woman who occasionally sheds tears while portions of testimony from the hearings are heard. A statement about feminism and race accompanies the closing titles.

  • Fly My Spirits

    Elaine Pain has been drawing stylized birds for many years. To her, they are a universal “bird of hope.” Bright and colourful birds, with a life of their own, move to percussion music by Gordon Parsons, giving them a primitive power.

  • For a Woman in El Salvador, Speaking

    Claudina Calderon, pregnant, with a small son, disappeared in San Salvador, abducted by government security forces. Her plight generates this filmic meditation, creating the voice of her mother through poetry, music, and murals to dramatize the story of one woman who stands for many. This film was made for the Women’s Association of El Salvador (AMES). With Susan Freundlich, sign artist, and the voices of Carolyn Forche and Yanira Chacon.

  • Queer Camp Trilogy

    The Queer Camp Trilogy is a series of experimental films exploring the hidden dimensions of queer Japanese American wartime history. This trilogy, made up of Looking For Jiro (2011), Warning Shot (2016), and On the Line (2018), was inspired by first-generation Japanese Americans who were incarcerated by the US government during World War II. These subjects left subtle yet discernible traces of same-sex intimacy or gender nonconformity in the archive, despite the enormous pressure put upon Japanese Americans to accept their imprisonment quietly, prove their patriotic loyalty, and smile for Ansel Adams during their unlawful imprisonment. I approached their enigmatic…

  • How Long?

    A strange series of events have propelled the world into an uncertain, looming future. A young woman wakes to find her partner pacing in the rain, wracked with anxiety over an unidentified yet seemingly inevitable disaster. She tries to comfort her partner amid her own escalating fear — and a cataclysmic change may be closer than either of them had imagined.

  • It Matters What

    Absences and translations motivate this experimental animation in an exploration of the methods and materials of reproduction and inscription. The inquiry is set within a framework of practical and critical human relationships with other-than-human-species elucidated by the theorist Donna Haraway. A fragment from Haraway’s essay “Tentacular Thinking: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene” is reworked here as a poetic manifesto. Enigmatic found-footage calls into question human violence over animal species. Plant life is both the subject matter of the images and assists the means of photographic reproduction.  The techniques used include in-camera animation, contact prints and phytograms created by the exposure of 16mm film overlaid with plant…

  • Button OUT!

    Button OUT! is a lively animated personal homage to the filmmakers own history of protest and the wider story of LGBTQ2S+ experiences contained in the collection of over 1200 buttons housed at The ArQuives: Canada’s LGBTQ2+ Archives in Toronto. Originally part of commissioning program: “Now and Then” — a video-art exhibition developed by the RT Collective in collaboration with the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives (CLGA), Myseum of Toronto and the Gladstone Hotel. **Programmer’s Choice Best Short Film, Fairy Tales Queer Film Festival, 2020**

  • The Evening Thread

    An old woman prepares to die. Accompanied by her granddaughter, she reflects on the memories of her life, and on the profound experience of being human, before taking the next step into the unknown.