Film Categories: Work by Women

  • Serenity

    A visual symphony in which the striking notes include: hoodoo formations created by eons of erosion that give a strong sense of decay, by Japanese gardens whose layouts provide a structure and acts as a tool for quiet contemplation, and by birds which act as a symbol of man’s soaring spirit and other-worldliness. Music and soundtrack by Darryl Miller.

  • Sex Without Glasses

    “The quintessential boy meets girl story, ‘Sex Without Glasses’ is a tale about relationships – of various kinds. This film has everything from alphabets (manual) to zithers, and features some of Toronto’s most celestial bodies.” – Anna Gronau

  • Short Story, A

    A humorous look at a young girl’s reaction when she discovers that her younger sister is suddenly taller than she is. Faced with the reality that she will be short for the rest of her life, she tries to adapt as best as she can. Being a short person living in a world geared to tall people is not easy. Eventually, she joins a group of short people whose aim is to unobtrusively scale the world down to their size and slowly make their presence felt. Note: Available in French language.

  • Sifted Evidence

    A woman is telling the story of how she went to Mexico looking for an obscure archaeological site; how she met a man who promised to take her there; how they stayed together locked in cross-purposes and misunderstandings – how, but never why. The central event has been reconstructed through stills, narration, and enactment by two performers in a tableau limited by the boundaries of a front projection screen. “Patricia Gruben’s striking featurette starts like a parody of anthropological film and turns into an hallucinatory subjective account of one woman’s Mexican misadventure. Among the most assured experimental narratives of the…

  • Sigmund Freud’s Dora

    In 1889, Sigmund Freud began treatment with an 18-year-old girl who was brought to him for analysis by her father after she had written a suicide note. Freud was eager to use this case to demonstrate the hypotheses laid out in his “Interpretation of Dreams,” but after only three months of treatment the young woman walked out, without being cured. Five years later, Freud published an account of this failed treatment, calling it a “Fragment of an Analysis” and giving his patient the name Dora – that of a servant in his household. Recently, Dora has been a focus for…

  • Signal

    A woman patient becomes both the subject and site of an ophthalmologist’s probe. “Signal” parallels an eye examination with semaphore codes to suggest that the modern visualizing technologies used in science and the military have colonized the body and forever changed the boundaries reached, the vision, and the language of the individual self.

  • simulacrum

    “Simulacrum” attempts to fashion the experience of absorbing plastic art through a time-based medium. Rather than voice-over documentary commentary, this short video authors an “Applebroogesque” environment. As in Applebroog’s constructs, surface indications wash over tensions that glue people to situations and each other. In “Simulacrum”, a family portrait becomes unhinged. Carefully tended family “secrets” get a night out on the town and the waiter gets more than the orders. Finally, the daughter’s embarrassment fractures into visions of Applebroog paintings, until her thoughts marry the artwork in a batle of imagery and emotions.

  • Sink or Swim

    Through a series of twenty-six short stories, a young girl recounts the events that shaped her childhood and formed her adult perceptions of fatherhood, family, work and play. The stories are told in a simple, direct manner, but are full of ambiguity, confused loyalties, and an apprehension of danger and loss. “I can think of no more corrosively moving refutation of the law of the father than Su Friedrich’s extraordinarily precise ‘Sink or Swim.’ Summoning her nerve, Friedrich rather fearlessly refines her previous researches into the unexplored area of memory, dream and desire.” – Ernest Larson Selected screenings: New York…

  • Sister

    In the attempt to find out how and why her sister died, a young woman discovers her sexuality. How her desire for women is held prisoner in the mourning and mystery surrounding her sister’s suicide. With a nod to the youthful fetish films of Anger and the J.D’s, scenes which begin light and fun with mod girls out on an adventure, grow dense and wet as sexual longing fulminates.

  • Beating

    “Beating” – to get beaten or give a beating, to beat oneself up. To beat the odds. Metal is forged by beating. Birds beat their wings, the sun beats down, and our hearts… “Beating” exists in the area of boundaries. I work with images as they can be registered between abstraction and representation, between blurred and defined, between the formless and the formed – in-between, in motion. I try to render images suggestively, bodily and to use vocalizations and words for texture as well as information. (BS) “Water, like fire, is a dimension of the carnival insisting on the stateless…