Film Categories: Work by Women

  • Helpless

    Based on a tale from the work of Maritime folklorist Helen Creighton, “Helpless” is set in a fogbound world of superstition and magic. When a strange and terrifying illness befalls Walton Collins’ son Mortimer, the fisherman turns to a mysterious stranger with elemental powers to heal the helpless boy. An unsettling tale from the past, “Helpless” mines the dark realms of sorcery and desire. “Helpless” is conceived as both a cultural film work and an homage to Helen Creighton. The script for “Helpless” comes out of a collaboration with respected visual artist Eric Walker. A native Nova Scotian, Maritime history…

  • Silent Song

    “Silent Song” brings new life to a remarkable piece of 1945 footage found by chance in an archive. “Silent Song” completes a deeply personal trilogy on family history and Holocaust memory. The first two films of the trilogy, “Zyklon Portrait” (13min. 1999) and “The Walnut Tree” (11min. 2000) have been seen in 20 countries around the globe, garnering numerous awards. In the pandemonium of the liberation of Nazi concentration camp Dachau, a U.S. army cameraman filmed a young boy playing the accordian. This strangely poetic moment offers an unusual contrast to the all-too-familiar WWII liberation images of emaciated prisoners in…

  • Sweet Boy

    “Sweet Boy” reveals an imaginative lesbian world where erotic fantasies bring sexual healing. Filmmaker Karen Everett’s thoughtful, stylized and highly personal memoir focuses on the psychological and spiritual dynamics of Mommy/Boy role-play in dyke relationships. Sexy ageplay with a maternal femme catalyzes a wild, energetic boy in Everett’s psyche. Beautifully shot, this compelling Jungian autobiography dramatizes the filmmaker’s inner struggle, sexual adventures and lesson in mothering herself.

  • Camera People

    This multi-ethnic collage of home movies shows people’s various reactions when they realize they are “on camera.” Dancing kids upstage one another while bolder characters upstage the camera lens. “Camera People” provides upbeat insights into the meaning of home movies and people’s relationship to them. “This vibrant display of home movie conventions is as much about people as filmmaking.” – After Image

  • Airplane Film

    “Airplane show take-offs, landings, mid-air stalls, planes lurching through storms and countless characters yelling over propeller noise. These bits call up every emotion connected with flight: anxiety, longing, escape, destruction, power…It all amounts to fear of flying – just another manipulated sentiment in the context of a regular film, used to set the unconscious on edge without anybody noticing. Here it’s a breathless, liberating free-association.” – Renee Shafransky Spanning 40 years of aviation through feature clips wrenched from their cozy narrative settings, the film switches perspectives relentlessly. Pilots gaze out of windows to static shots of the earth. Air Force…

  • Once

    “Once” is a film about language, loss, and the construction of memory through language. Through voiceovers and fragmented footage, the characters in “Once” tell how they have come to study language in an attempt to relocate themselves at particular junctures in their lives. They describe their desire to learn Yiddish, a language they have speculative connections to or memories of. Their distance from the language and its intrinsic power to link them to an identity seems to increase their appetites for this language lost. Yiddish, it appears, while providing the elements of language, also represents a loss for, and only…

  • Way Out, A

    “A Way Out” is a documentary about breaking the cycle of poverty in Canadian’s oldest and largest “ghetto,” Regent Park. In addition to talking about what it is like to grow up poor in North America, it explores the reasons behind one person finding a way out and others remaining. As a former resident of a low-income community, Christene Browne went back to find out what had happened to some of her old friends. Formal and impromptu interviews are conducted and the community is revealed through footage and stills. A young man who currently lives in the community is also…

  • False Creek

    False Creek was named when industrialists developing the waterway in Vancouver discovered that the creek was actually an inlet.

  • 23

    Mixing live-action with illustration, “23” tells the story of one girl’s discovery that her 23rd birthday means more than she thinks. Andrea, a frustrated and cynical woman, makes her way to an undisclosed location. Following her journey we begin to learn how one’s person life is unknowingly connected and interwined with the lives of others – that randomness is nothing more than a pattern of a deeply imbedded complexity of order, an order so complex it is not immediately discernible or obvious. Inside an industrial building turned loft, Andrea steps into an elevator for an encounter that will change the…

  • Maya’s Dream

    A woman recalls a dream about a friend and a bird. As she relives this memory, a sylph-like fair-faced child flies around a skating rink. A love-poem about the confines of domesticity, place and freedom, and the ephemeral nature of childhood.