Film Categories: Work by Women

  • Mayo Jar

    Super 8 footage of deserted and destroyed family businesses along the lonely Trans-Canada Highway accompanies a haunting song about betrayal and loss. Originally made for the 2002 Splice This! Super 8 Film Festival, Toronto.

  • All Flesh Is Grass

    “Susan Oxtoby’s film “All Flesh Is Grass” is one of the most aptly tragic visions of life-on-earth I’ve recently seen – one of the most perfect step-printed hand-held (hold your hand’s eye) pain’s taking orders-of-metaphor perhaps yet created through any conscious arrangement of symbols inasmuch as Susan evolves much of the aesthetic of Arthur Lipsett free of his symbolic cynicism; and she holds the camera personally to her ‘heart’ in a way Joseph Cornell would have, I’m sure, had he been able to work with the camera directly: in other words she has not distanced herself by using ‘found footage’…

  • Fartasia

    “Fartasia” was made by running film through a sewing machine. The result is, as the filmmaker says, “surprisingly organic.”

  • Kill Road

    “Enduring a dysfunctional family requires stamina, wit and sharp survival instincts, as demonstrated in this anguished ode to family peculiarity. A pixilated tale of a girl whose off-kilter parents become lost in a mission to nurse a raccoon – an unfortunate road-kill victim.” – Images Festival, 2004 AWARDS: Images Prize for Best Canadian Media Artwork in the Festival, Images Festival of Independent Film and Video, Toronto, 2004

  • This Boy

    Set in 1965, “This Boy” is a funny and charming film which traces an afternoon in the life of Kit, an imaginative, ardent tomboy of eleven who idolizes John Lennon and secretly goes about dressed like him. One spring afternoon, Kit and her best friend Mike decide to pay a visit to their classmate Holly, Kit’s crush. What begins as a light-hearted adventure shifts as the two friends get further from home. Kit and Mike are surprised by what they see en route, and even more so by their own actions and poorly understood desires.

  • Old Lady

    “There is more tenderness packed in each frame of this mini-opus of amour than a shelf full of ‘Titanic’s. Using a quick-witted blend of voice-over, pop jams and Super 8 signage, O’Brien stares unflinchingly at her 35-year-old mirror, wondering aloud about cruelties gathered beneath the name of love. Inspiration arrives via grandmother Alice, who found happiness when a teen sweet heart picked up a fifty-year-old promise, and Charlotte… who fell in love for the first time late in life.” – Mike Hoolboom

  • Sink or Swim

    Finally, straight out of the archives, this rare historical footage has been recovered from the National Synchronized Swimming vault. Ballet arms, jazz hands and strangely perfect routines make up the performances of six talented women, the “Sassy Synchronized Swimmers.” This team virtually walks on water during the Golden Cap Championship in the Banff National Park.

  • Fat of the Land

    In the first kitchen-grease-powered road movie, five women tour America fueling up on the waste oil their fellow travelers have left behind. From New York to San Francisco, the women careen across the nation in their modified van, fueled only by leftover restaurant frying oil. Through interviews and chance encounters, the video sardonically critiques the stranglehold petroleum has on our economy, while investigating the possibility of bio-diesel as an alternative. Shot in an energetic style, consistent with the do-it-yourself impetus of the project, this documentary humourously engages ordinary people in a serious discussion about transportation fuel. Selected screenings: MACBA, Barcelona,…

  • Through Your Eyes

    “Through Your Eyes” tells the story of Maria, a young Latin-American woman whose parents disappeared under the Argentinian military dictatorship when she was a child. Risking it all to uncover the mystery of their disappearance, Maria delves into her memories and history – a history which struggles to stay alive in a society which attempts to silence it. In Spanish with English sub-titles.

  • She was so young back then

    A rephotographed excerpt from “Fast Times at Ridgemount High” is reconstituted as seedy pornography.