Film Categories: Work by Women

  • The Comics

    When Annie and Mark’s controversial comedy video goes viral, they make a run for the country. There, they hide out in a worn down, under the radar motel – hoping to stay out of the public eye while their video rapidly makes its rounds on social media.

  • One Day

    “One Day” is an experimental film that delves into the depth of a single photograph. Captured by the artist during her initial exploration of film photography in Toronto, this snapshot becomes the centerpiece of an experimental piece. The passage of six years before its development mirrors the artist’s personal journey- a journey that leads her to choose Toronto as her permanent abode after traversing Iran, Montreal, and Europe. Relocating with her family in 2009, the city’s embrace as a second home poses a poignant challenge. The haunting presence of immigrant status looms large, leaving an indelible mark on the artist’s…

  • Whispers Mary

    As Venla documents plants in solitude, she slips deep into the fantastical world she observes and begins to question her own reality. Whispers Mary is a Canada Council for the Arts-funded short experimental digital/analog film.

  • Happy Birthday Baby

    Bonding between parents and baby helps create the new family; this process is clearly explained in a warm and informative way. As the family prepares for the birth of a child, the relationships of parents and siblings, as well as the birth itself, appear through film.

  • A More Radiant Sphere

    A More Radiant Sphere tells the long-lost story of Communist poet, activist and Canadian political prisoner Joe Wallace, bringing him to life through archival material, both real and imagined. This hybrid film is shot primarily on 16mm film and weaves together the story of Wallace, the failed Canadian Communist Party, and the filmmaker’s own surprising discovery of her relation to Wallace through a distant relationship with her father (Joe’s great-nephew). Segmented throughout are folk songs based on Wallace’s writings, performed by award-winning folk musician Simone Schmidt, aka Fiver. The film delves into the limits of history and its records, and…

  • Thorn on her side

    A human narrates the story of a bad dream after buying a gorgeous plant at the market. What starts as an innocent encounter to relieve loneliness from isolation becomes a nightmarish seduction scene between a plant and its human. Together they give birth to a new creature.

  • Currents / Perpendicolare Avanti

    Currents / Perpendicolare Avanti is a camera-less, hand-made, 16mm film collage, based on the artist’s autobiographical experience as an immigrant. In three movements, the film explores the dynamics of inhabiting the in-between space of moving between multiple countries and their temporalities, through visual and sound abstraction, interlacing and recycling pre-existing film materials and, using fragments from anonymous orphan films. Utilizing these so-called scraps, Currents is a film of extensive remediation, treated by hand through the use of the emulsion lifting technique, thereby re-imagining, re-constructing, and de-constructing the liminality of immigrant life. The re-writing of the self in Currents is produced…

  • Skyscraper Film

    Can I use the film strip structure as an architectural element? Is it possible to use the celluloid from the film as a cement? Can these skyscrapers be turned into something else? Can solid lines blend into sensual, natural curves? Can I melt skyscrapers? Skyscraper Film was created to try to give a visual answer to these questions, arising from the artist’s relation to urban maps of various locations and their respective skylines, populated by imposing skyscrapers and reinforced concrete panoramas: Quebec, Kingston (Canada), Maryland, Pittsburgh, Baltimore (USA) etc. Cities are presented to us as an abstract handmade camera-less collage,…

  • Negative / Positive Film

    Negative / Positive Film is a hand-made, camera-less collage film composed of layers of erotic 16mm films from the 1920s, 1940s, and 1970s, intermingled with nature documentaries and layers of organic materials. This visual abstraction merges together both positive black-and-white film and its negative black-and-white counterpart – on the same film base. This allows the film to exist in two versions, one positive and, the other negative. The film is an abstract remediation of female bodies dislodged from their original erotic context and ripped away from their male co-protagonists. The man is removed from the picture, while the female body…

  • Self-Portrait in Hell

    Self-Portrait in Hell is a hybrid film that combines analog and digital film manipulation techniques. Multiple layers of 8mm films and disparate fragments are amalgamated to create a self-portrait of the director. A singular self-portrait, since ironically the subject of the film is not the director but the image found in abandoned film archives, the image of another, unknown woman. The first layer is from a 1970s 8mm home movie titled Woman Dancing with Dog and was found in an antique shop. The second layer is an 8mm film belonging to an unknown archive, which the artist buried for a…