Film Categories: Work by Women

  • I Know I’m Late

    Playing on the classic backstage drama, this short musical featuring Jef Barbara’s I Know I’m Late embeds the story of its own making into a fantasy performance in the dressing room of a Montreal cabaret. A chorus of backup dancers distracts the star of the show as he explains his tardiness through song. The film culminates in a dance routine reminiscent of ’90s MTV music videos and offers an appreciative reflection of idiosyncratic individuality, community and inclusion.

  • Auroratone

    This abstract cut-out animation attempts to create orderly pixel patterns using only hand-cut and hand-arranged materials, without any grids, rulers, or visual guides. A stream-of-consciousness series of abstract patterns dance, transform, answer to one another, and at times evolve into recognizable icons, as if sending subliminal messages from a child’s play session. Back-lit pastel colorscapes reflect the airy, other-wordly transmission of Julia Holter’s song “So Lillies” .

  • Doing My Rounds, Checking Some Rounds

    This solo performance for the camera pays homage to 1970s video art, exploring how the electronic manipulation of the video signal can create a choreocinema for body and machine. Choreographic patterns melding retro moves with a minimalist aesthetic participate in a jagged, pulsing duet with the danceable beats and noisy textures of the track “Doing My Rounds, Checking Some Rounds” by Alterity Problem (Alexander Moskos and Joel Taylor). Effects were created in real-time with a raster-scan device built by Nam June Paik and Shuya Abe, accessed during a residency at the now-closed Experimental TV Center in upstate New York.

  • A & B in Ontario

    “Hollis and I came back to Toronto on holiday in the summer of ’67. We were staying at a friend’s house. We worked our way through the city and eventually made it to the island. We followed each other around. We enjoyed ourselves. We said we were going to make a film about each other – and we did.” – Joyce Wieland “A & B in Ontario” was completed eighteen years after the original material was shot. After Frampton’s death, the film was assembled by Wieland into a cinematic dialogue in which the collaborators (in the spirit of the sixties)…

  • Elle-vis

    Elle-vis: A Woman…Impersonating a Man…Impersonating a Legend Collectively written, produced and directed by a trio of young Toronto filmmakers, “Elle-vis” is an irreverent and offbeat half-hour comedy about a renowned Elvis impersonator who is barred from performing by the all-powerful Elvis Impersonators Union after a lurid tabloid newspaper reveals the slanderous fact that he is… a woman. On the evening of her comback performance, Angela becomes the reluctant centre of a storm of controversy and protest. Outside the nightclub where she is to perform, a crowd of ardent feminists and loyal fans clash with an angry mob of union supporters,…

  • Skeleton Dance

    Have you ever wondered what would happen if you X-rayed a skeleton at a dance club? This experimental cut-out animation offers something of an answer. Besides dancing between abstract shapes throughout the video, the skeleton character cuts out a pair of pants from some paper, tries them on and runs away. The footage is processed using a variety of analog video synthesizers, including a Paik-Abe Raster Scan Device (aka Wobulator). The electronic voltage of the soundtrack by LA’s Dva Damas directs the parameters of certain effects. Artwork, animation, processing and editing done by Emily Pelstring while in residence at the…

  • Jack

    This is the official music video for the U.S. Girls song ‘Jack’, the first single off of the album Gem (FatCat Records, 2012). In the video, a sequined woman (played by Meghan Remy) sings from the perspective of Jack the Ripper, confounding the relationship between looker and looked at, predator and prey. This glam-inspired video was befittingly shot on a Hitachi FP-22, 3-tube vintage camera by an all-female crew. It plays on classic images of American femininity, and the lyrics of the song contribute a subtext of the misogynistic serial killer’s gaze. With references to Kenneth Anger’s ‘Puce Moment’ and…

  • Solarization

    An experiment in solarization filmed at the Independent Imaging Retreat in Mount Forest, Canada.

  • Une Terre familière

    Where is there to belong to? To not feel strange? To not ask permission? Ground. Home. A familiar land. Une Terre familière is structured as a series of long-take vignettes, each centered around a site purposing a collision of nature and artifice. Within highly manicured environments, these sites attempt to imitate natural processes and un-peopled ecosystems and to preserve and manage elements of nature. The figures in Une Terre familière struggle to do their best with what they have- to find their own sun at the tanning salon, their own clouds in the steam room- to improve, to connect, to…

  • Finding a Place to Sleep

    Based on stories my grandmother told me, I re-imagine while working as a cleaner the experiences of my ancestors during the Holodomor (forced famine) in Ukraine during the Stalinist-Soviet era. The “film” image is re-invented through digital video to enact a sense of ambiguity between authenticity and fiction, as can also be present in the act of oral storytelling. This is one chapter in “Stories for a Future Generation,” a series of shorts which together tell the stories of my family’s and my own migrations, and the inter-generational impacts of those upon our lives and on those of our family’s…