Film Categories: Work by Women

  • Tending Towards the Horizontal

    The voice-over text, written and performed by France Daigle, creates three images which recur alternately throughout the film: a bird flapping its wings tirelessly; a figure (man, boy?) who sits on a hay bale, watching the city below; and a woman in a library who reads only what others have left behind. The filmed images are predominantly houses: houses seen in passing, along the horizontal; houses reflecting sky and trees in their windows; houses partially hidden by trees or the shadows they cast; houses and office towers simultaneously pictured in stages of demolition and construction. The images dissolve in and…

  • There Is in Power… Seduction

    A short exploration of the symbolic ambiguity of corporate versus sensual power. Does a woman adopt the mannerisms of a man when she enters the “male” territory of corporate power? There is of course no correct answer, and perhaps there is really no question. The body is language. Power seduces and is seductive.

  • There, Try Alive…

    “There is a voice crying in the wilderness”, Catherine Clement and Hellen Cixous say, “the voice of the body dancing, laughing, shrieking, crying. Whose is it?” It is they say, “the voice of a woman, newborn and yet archaic, a voice of milk and blood, a voice silenced but savage.” Introduction of “The Newly Born Woman” by Hellen Cixous and Catherine Clement. This film is an experimental psychodrama in which a woman goes through an incredible inner journey in which all fear, confusion, desire and attempts are bound and conquered towards a better understanding of herself. The doors represent the…

  • Things in Between

    “Things in Between” is a story about a wife, her husband, and his lover. The film invites viewers to share the self-discovery of two women: Betty, an East Indian, who has just left her husband Phil; and Betty’s girlfriend Cannes, a Chinese, who is secretly Phil’s lover. Caught between desire and friendship, they must now face painful choices…

  • Through and Through

    The film is silent except for four short segments of sync sound, interviews with a man and a woman, which touch on two areas: control and anger, and the pressure of history on one’s identity – how do I identify myself as “I”, how as part of a “We”? The film is visual, perceptual; it was made in awe of the world that goes on with and without us and of our personal, human struggles. It is a film about life and death; a film of discrete units of the eternal and a film of living here and now. It…

  • Big Deal, So What

    Set in the polyester 70s, “Big Deal, So What” is a deceptively simple look at the social dislocation of Rachel – a skeptical teen whose discontent sets the story in motion. Rachel leaves home and endures a number of subtle miscues, mild mishaps, and astrological misfortunes. Much to her chagrin, it is an unexpected gesture of goodwill from mother to daughter that brings her to the threshold of post-suburban independence. This is a playfully poignant film about what life is not supposed to be like.

  • Trilogy, A

    “In 1986 Sternberg completed ‘A Trilogy’ – a moving and complex work which philosophically narrates the separation of mother and son. Composed of a number of apparently separate and discrete elements – Sternberg brings them together in a masterful weave of archaic ritual, home movie, dramatic interlude and speculative address. At the heart of this intertextual weave is the filmmaker herself and her teenaged son. As he reaches the age of consent, and prepares to make his final deposition of leave taking, this film is a reminder of all that has passed between them, and hints at what might lie…

  • Two/Doh

    “Two/Doh” is an evocative poetic pastiche exploring the public and private spaces of desire, and its intersection with the cultural and erotic connections between two women of different origins: Persian/Armenian and South Asian/Sri Lankan.

  • BINGO

    How is it that bingo has such a hold on people? What does it take to be a winner? What does luck have to do with it? “Bingo” is an exploration of these questions from the inside out. The “bingo mind” is formed with the belief that there isn’t enough to go around and you’re lucky if you get some. The social and ritual elements of the game are captured in the textures of the images and sounds created to explore the themes of winning and losing. The stylized dramatizations of childhood memories provide the backdrop for the “script” of…

  • UR Lucky

    I placed a medallion on the sidewalk and filmed whoever happened along to pick it up. The film is about not being able to have control over the event, and the acceptance of this fact. This is the first film in my Performance Trilogy, a series of films which also include “Snow Search” and “Making a Scene.” (MD)