Film Categories: Work by Women

  • Topology of a String

    Topology of A String is a video installation of seven looping videos that investigate permutations and possibilities of a single continuous line in space. Without ever breaking the line, hundreds of variant forms can be created by weaving the string over and under fingers, across the palms or backs of the hands. This project links string games, an ancient form of entertainment shared by cultures the world over, to the branch of mathematics called topology. Each sequence starts at the same opening position yet a single change in the over-under pattern results in a completely different form. The near infinite…

  • THE GENDER LADY: THE FABULOUS DR. MAY COHEN

    Roe v Wade and women’s abortion rights are under concerted attack in a number of American states. In Canada abortion has been legal for more than 30 years, but access to abortion services varies considerably across the country and conservative MPs and MLAs are increasingly participating in anti-choice strategy gatherings. Into this retrogressive context arrives a timely documentary: the compelling story of a courageous, pro-choice feminist campaigning Canadian family physician, “The Gender Lady – The Fabulous Dr May Cohen”. Dr. May Cohen has advocated for women’s health, women’s rights, abortion rights, LGBT rights and human sexuality for more than fifty…

  • The Gender Lady: The Fabulous Dr. May Cohen Short

    This is a short preview of the full documentary The Gender Lady: The Fabulous Dr. May Cohen. Dr. May Cohen is a brilliant Canadian physician and women’s rights trailblazer. For over 60 years, she has advocated powerfully in Canada and internationally for women’s reproductive rights, women’s health and women physicians’ advancement — and in the end, for us all. May is widely recognized for her many contributions to women’s health, sexuality, abortion choice and human rights. Numerous medical awards bear her name. The Gender Lady explores Dr. Cohen’s life and career and her extraordinary gender equity and human sexuality contributions.…

  • Extractions

    A personal film about Canada’s extraction industry and its detrimental effects on the land and Indigenous peoples. This film parallels resource extraction with the booming child apprehension Industry currently operating in Canada which is responsible for putting more Indigenous children into foster care than were in Residential Schools. As the filmmaker reviews his life and how these Industries have affected him, he also reflects on having his own eggs retrieved and frozen to make an Indigenous baby.

  • On the Rocks

    The filmmaker puts the spotlight on her husband, a recovering alcoholic, to learn and understand his thought process as an addict. She also reflects on her own struggles dealing with the alcoholism and its effect on their marriage.

  • Through Foreign Eyes

    The filmmaker thought of making this poetic, mosaic documentary in a bookshop, when she came across the words of poet Manoel de Barros about “the accent of the place of our origin we carry in our eyes”. She never found the quote again, but in the course of the next few years, she carried out the project with the help of other contributors, mainly the film editor. She created a film essay combining reflections on the identity and ethnic roots of several natives of the Brazilian city of Recife, who live abroad, and the images of the places where they…

  • Doing and undoing: poems from within #1 radiotherapy

    It deals with interventions that I had made with my mother during her cancer treatment. The film is part of large project dealing with my mother’s cancer healing process. Hacer y Deshacer: Poems from Within (2019) is an interactive video installation. Most of the video sequences show Gelis’s mother undressing, one strand of yarn at a time, sometimes in Panama’s Casco Viejo (historic district), sometimes in the turbulent waters of the Pacific. Using her mother’s body, she tells the story of a cancer survivor, the story of countless others. Gelis invites us into the healing process: the viewer can change…

  • Island Story

    “I know nothing about the filmmaker, but with a short film as odd and strangely poignant as this one, the mystery makes it all the better. The blindingly and like a Martian horizon, the sun plays with the viewer’s stability. A narrator gives the account of a strange tale of a couple on a transformative journey into a world of paradise with no language. Animalistic gesticulations and instinctive expression emanate from the body until both of them grow apart and then into other versions of themselves, never to be the same again. A grainy vintage-like feel permeates the alien world…

  • Framing Factory

    “The American not living every minute of every day in a daily way does not make what he has to say to be soothing he wants what he has to say to be exciting, and to move as everything moves, not to move as emotion is moving but to move as anything that really moves is moving… Think of American life as it is lived, they all move so much because in moving they know for certain they can know it any way but in moving they really know it as certain that they are not daily living.” – Gertrude…

  • TERMINALLY IN LOVE

    TERMINALLY IN LOVE is a first-person journey through a haze of heartbreak, pot smoke, heroic delusions, failed connections, wistful fantasies and cringeworthy dreams.