Film Categories: Work by Women

  • Derby and Groma

    While taking a stroll in Buenos Aires on his birthday several years ago, photo collector Pablo Cruz Aguirre came across an unusual gift. Blowing down the street towards him was a collection of letters, postcards and photos depicting a performing duo named Derby and Groma. This collection of artifacts contained a fragmented narrative of two people. Desolina Merlino, alias Derby, was born 1891 and of Italian descent. Samuel Salomón Gromatzky, alias Groma, was the son of Jewish immigrants in Argentina, born in 1895. Under the name of Derby and Groma, the two performed acrobatic dance routines in variety theaters throughout…

  • Clear and No Screws

    Clear and No Screws profiles SendAPackage, a wholesale warehouse founded by ex-prisoner Chris Barrett where all of the items sold meet the 36-page list of rules regulating packages allowed into the New York prison system. From pattern-less boxer shorts to hip hop cassette tapes specially produced for New York State’s 54,000 prisoners, Clear and No Screws offers a tender glimpse into life in prison through the circulation of regulated goods.

  • Family Daycare: Through a New Lens

    This work grew organically out of the Family Daycare Education Project, a ten-month research and outreach project based at the Cabrillo College Early Childhood Education Department in Aptos, California. The tape includes extensive footage of children in family daycare situations, modelling use of home environments and good adult/child interaction. There are scenes from neighbourhood-based classes attended by providers, including one of Spanish-speaking providers in the Flats, Santa Cruz. Throughout the tape, providers speak for themselves – outlining the issues, needs and motivation. Nancy Andreasom, experienced educator and director of the project, speaks about the importance of recognizing and responding to…

  • Spermwhore

    This short film is a queer, feminist and experimental work that began in 2009 and came to fruition in the spring of 2013. Spermwhore is a queer experimental film about unwanted childlessness in a world where normative heterosexual relationships dictate who can become parents and in what way. When it comes to reproduction our merciless bodies reduce us to merely a set sex or given gender. But the longing for children is not limited to our bodies, and the possibility of pregnancy can be gifted, shared and undertaken together.

  • Mono

    Mono (2015) is a mystical film on monolithic architecture, monophonic music and the ancient female old. A celebration of slowness. A dense video-audio dynamic, demanding and minimal, suggests a mysterious background story, a genesis of drone and stones. Alongside with atmospheric static shots of various ancient and modern monoliths (including an artificial one), the tale is performed in three languages (English, Welsh and Old Norse) narrated by women of different generations and cultures representing the ancient past, the current presence and the distant future. No actual reference to time or place is made. Six musicians have designed music for different passages…

  • Pivot

    Several years ago I came across a book by body language expert Joe Navarro where he describes physical gestures and how to determine whether someone is experiencing high stress or low stress with the ultimate aim of decoding whether someone is lying or telling the truth. Pivot is a recording of these enacted gestures after a computer algorithm has randomized them. The algorithm is based on an audio recording of morning birds where the randomness of the birds chirping was used to determine the randomness of the placement of gestures in the script. The performance was recorded inside the legal…

  • Color Neutral

    A color explosion sparkles, bubbles, and fractures in this hand-crafted 16mm film. Reeves utilized an array of mediums and direct-on-film techniques to create this boisterous, psychedelic morsel of cinema as material. Reeves’ soundtrack mixes samples from rusty, dusty old machines, records, and electric waves to create an aural passage through technological progress.

  • Far Shore, The

    Set in 1918 Ontario. Eulalie, a Quebecoise, marries a Toronto engineer but finds life with him oppressive. She falls in love with Tom, a painter who is an acquaintance of her husband’s and, with him, escapes briefly to Northern Ontario before they are hunted down by her jealous husband. “For something like two decades, Joyce Wieland – the Toronto painter, filmmaker, quiltmaker and lay ecologist – has been creating an individual sensibility and then displaying it, piece by piece, in the various art forms that have suited her purposes. In ‘The Far Shore’, her feature film, she articulates that sensibility…

  • Cairo In One Breath

    Every day, people are being replaced by machines. The adhan is a 1,400 year-old oral tradition in the process of unprecedented change in Cairo. After 60 generations, thousands of individual muezzins are being replaced by a single voice broadcast from a radio station as part of a plan of the Mubarak regime. As the Adhan Unification Project takes hold, Egypt undergoes Revolution and regime change. The film follows muezzins from when they heard rumors of the AUP through its implementation, which since 2010 has displaced thousands.

  • Setting West

    “Setting West” was made using original printing materials from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, such as wood type, borders and stereotypes of “Cowboys and Indians”, trains and bison. These words and images were printed directly onto 35mm clear film stock at eminent letterpress studios in North America: the Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum in Two Rivers, the Center for Book and Paper Arts in Chicago, the Hatch Show Print in Nashville and the Musée de l’imprimerie du Québec & Lovell Litho in Montréal. Judith Poirier printed 1643 feet of film to produce her abstract western and her…