Film Format: 16mm

  • Once

    Poetry. Film. Light. Life. An excerpt from Rilke’s “Ninth Elegy” introduces this silent film which evokes the beauty and brevity of life. Images shimmer in an uncanny light. We catch glimpses only. Silent with sound preface.

  • Four Toronto Films

    The suite of four short films explores ideas about framing, centred round the attempt to find a necessary correspondence between the facts of the camera apparatus; fixed, rectangular frame and aspect ratio, and the work’s subject matter. A related idea concerns the figuration within the films of the manner in which the camera creates its own pro-filmic. To this end, there is a more or less recurring theme of frames within frames. Three of the four sections were filmed in, or within a stone’s throw of, the house in Toronto where I stayed while completing the work as an artist…

  • Dark Sun; Bright Shade

    “Dark Sun; Bright Shade” is a one-hour dramatic film which explores the cultural, social and political fabrics between two gay Chinese men living under parallel traditions within the Chinese social structure. Through the unfolding of events following the 1989 T’ien An Men Square Massacre in Beijing, the film focuses on Paul, a young Chinese-Canadian artist, and Kai, a foreign student in exile from mainland China, as they confront the differences in their politics, sexuality, cultural upbringing and family relationships. As they are drawn closer together it becomes obvious that, for the many displaced Chinese around the world, there lies ahead…

  • Quartet

    “Leading British avant-garde filmmaker Nicky Hamlyn is known for evoking the beauty in the everyday. His ‘Quartet’ comprises four variations on the same twenty shots of a flat, all beautiful ‘still lives.’ In the first two sections of the film, each shot contains an element of the subsequent shot, forming a necklace of images. These are strung together through a studied and sensual accumulation of time and space, both on the screen and in the imaginary. Thereafter, a release from structure compels us from contemplation toward memory and re-creation.” – Andréa Picard, Toronto International Film Festival

  • Moose Jaw: There’s a Future in Our Past (DVD Release)

    Available for purchase in the CFMDC Shop: https://www.cfmdc.org/shop. “Appropriate to a context of Canadian de-confederation, MOOSE JAW is at once a statement of the filmmaker’s own maturation; a regionalist dirge on the fatality of economic dependency; an excavation of our ever-vanishing collective past; and the ironic deconstruction of all the above.” – Michael Dorland, Art Gallery of Ontario Moose Jaw was a frontier boom-town flourishing on the Canadian Pacific rail line forging Canada as a “Dominion” in the late 1800s. But as rail gave way to the jet age, Moose Jaw began to decline. Now, museums dot the landscape (along…

  • Full Stop Hilltop

    A man’s elliptical story of the places he’s seen, the people he’s been and the water he’s drank.

  • American Dreams

    “James Benning’s films belie the cliches often attributed to avant-garde film. Elegantly conceived and realized, they are seductive as much for their visual audacity and originality as for the intellectual conundrums they challenge the viewer to resolve. ‘American Dreams’ is chock full of concrete, discrete elements that comprise an American iconography of the past three decades. “The film encourages a kind of perverse nostalgia for ‘the good old days’: Nixon’s ‘you don’t have Nixon to kick around any more’; Elvis’ response to questions about his gyrating style and the rumour that once he shot his mother; Patty Hearst’s ‘Tania’ statement;…

  • David Roche Talks to You about Love

    David Roche looks out from the screen and starts to talk about love as he rises in the freight elevator to his lofty abode. From the first few sentences, it’s clear that here’s a literate, witty script executed by an actor/writer who, in conjunction with the filmmaker, knows how to convey his autobiographical, deja-vu views. Poignant. Beautiful. Cynical. It is an insight into human relationships for those of all persuasions.

  • Factory of Light, The

    A young woman and a six-year-old boy suddenly find themselves alone in an empty city. They begin to look for where the people have disappeared to, and discover a light factory operated by a group of children. During the projection of the film in its original presentation, four musicians performed a live instrumental soundtrack composed by Pixie Cram and arranged by John Wrinch Williams. The soundtrack was recorded and integrated into a version of the film intended for traditional screenings. The film is also available as a performance piece.

  • Diane Bonder Compilation

    A compilation of works by the late American filmmaker Diane Bonder. Shot in Super 8 and 16mm in documentary, poetic and semi-narrative styles, Bonder’s work explores issues of belonging, landscape and loss. Her work has screened internationally at festivals including Ann Arbor (Michigan), Images (Toronto), European Media Arts Festival, Pacific Film Archive (San Francisco), Museum of Modern Art (NY), Brooklyn Museum of Art, and The Whitney Museum. Please see individual titles for descriptions. 1. I Remember Now, We Never Danced, I Miss You, Good-Bye (16mm, 8 min., 2006) 2. You Are Not From Here (Super 8 on video, 10 min.,…