Film Format: 16mm

  • passages

    The entire film takes place in one space – a room of which we see only one wall, upon which is the moving shadow of a tree being blown by the wind. In the window we see images, which act both as mirrors reflecting back what is happening inside the room, and as glass, allowing us to see what is happening outside the room. The film is divided into four sections plus an introduction with each section separated by a slow zoom in towards the window, drawing us through the successive levels of life and existence of the space of…

  • passing through / torn formations

    Music by Tucker Zimmerman. passing through/torn formations looks at a family blown apart by the migration from Czechoslovakia to Canada, the collision between old world and new. “‘passing through/torn formations’ extends from Eastern Europe and back again – an unraveling tapestry of family relations that speak of migration and translation.” – Marian McMahon “Philip Hoffman’s ‘passing through/torn formations’ is a wide open ramble through the labyrinth of memory, considered primarily as a family affair. The film deals with the life and history of Hoffman’s Czech-born mother and her family, as presented as a kind of polyphonic recitation of words, of…

  • Passion Crucified

    “Passion Crucified” is an episodic rite of passage rendered in tableau style. Part creation myth, part medieval science fiction, it enacts a typology of the body – offering us glimpses of Adam, Eve, Christ and Joan of Arc. Together they are figured as subterranean ideals, which continue to haunt us, even as they provide the means by which we might come to understand our own bodies. Begun as a dance performance, Torossian recasts her naked charge into a series of phantasmagoric settings – trees whose fruit show the faces of Medici children, drunken underground rooms filled with a rotting, natural…

  • Passion: A Letter in 16mm

    “Passion: A Letter in 16mm” is the story of a woman with too much passion and too little time. Linda Griffiths portrays a woman struggling to balance her craving for professional excellence as a documentary filmmaker with her need for intimacy. The first film by the award-winning director of “I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing.”

  • Past History

    Adventure, romance, politics and exile are themes in this unique combination of live action, archival photographs, and animation. Stories of people long ago and far away are brought to life, tracing a history of the effects of progress and development in Latin America on past and present generations.

  • Pat’s Birthday

    A day in the country with Claes Oldenburg and the Ray Gun Theatre Players, including such classic items as the haunted house, a gas station, an ice cream stand, miniature golf, airplane noises, and balloons. Things happen after each other in this film only because there isn’t room for everything at once. After all, time is not supposed to move in one direction any more than it does in another.

  • PATH

    Employing a simple three-part structure, “PATH” is about personal experience and the interpretation of that experience. Both humorous and serious, the film is a cross-Toronto exploration, expansively taking in a wide variety of people, events and situations. In creating a dynamic web of associations, “PATH” invites participation in the act of perception. The film’s structure works like this: Davis is filmed connecting dots on a street map; next she walks that distance on the street, filming as she goes; then she recalls and interprets what she has seen in memory sequences. The street sequences have a variety of different rhythms…

  • Patriotism 1

    Wieland’s kinetic romp casts David Shackman as an overexposed sleeper dogged by a patriotic march of tube steaks that finally refigures him as our most familiar icon of freedom. This pixillated short about hot dogs is the latest of Wieland’s early film works to be restored to circulation.

  • Ay Que Pelos!

    “Ay Que Pelos!” is a hand-processed experimental film about anxiety disorders and panic attack syndrome. This bilingual film (interweaving English and Spanish) incorporates personal experiences, family history, case studies and medical texts, and uses these to examine the perception and (mis)understanding of the disease. The film is visually structured to reflect and invoke the experience of panic attack.

  • Patriotism 2

    In a way a portrait of Dave Shackman with the American flag. The ending is a stop-motion animation of a set table with food moving and swirling and finally gathering together in a ball. Looking back at the film, the animation sequence seems to foreshadow Dave Shackman’s early death. He died shortly after the film was made.