Film Format: 16mm

  • Up to Scratch

    Based on a bus ride across Canada, both the sound track and visuals are content-laden collages that celebrate the work of alternative community cultural groups – women’s bands, poets, artists unions, and community radio – against a backdrop of unemployment. Music by Clive Robertson accompanies the cut-out animated images.

  • Upon Waking

    “Upon Waking” explores the family ritual of image gathering. A personal narrative which chronicles a fictitious bond between the filmmaker and her great-great grandmother through journals. Visual imagery, incorporating both film and video, works to create a metaphor of intervention and celebration of the gendered self.

  • Urban Fire

    A child is given birth in the womb of its dead mother. Child’s eyes perceive the death of the city. The last birth combined with the fire and destruction. The pure feeling… mind motion. The Urban Fire. OUTSIDE “Snow-blind on the street, there’s a glimpse of a Brick Wall. The heat of freeze acts on your eyes; one great glowing asprockalips, the bubblin’ sabbatier.” – Philip Hoffman

  • Urban Peasants

    The first section of the film consists of a no-image sound-track recording of a Yiddish language course that teaches us those expressions that will come in handy when we are far from home and need a toilet or a postage stamp. As Jacobs points out, there is of course, no country where Yiddish is a native language. There are pockets of elder citizens in various countries who speak it, as the members of the family whom we see later in the film do, but it is essentially an extinct language, the product of an oral tradition and only as a…

  • Use Once and Destroy

    Sketches about three heroin addicts in Montreal by ex-junkie filmmaker John L’Ecuyer. A stream-of-consciousness narration sails the viewer through Montreal’s underworld of characters: Red Theo, a dealer that treats his clients like family despite all the difficulties inherent in such a lifestyle; Nice Guy Nelson, a heroin addict that sought escape from reality by any means necessary, including auto-mutilation; and Brenda, a young woman at one time loved life but fell into the netherworld of heroin addiction, prostitution and AIDS.

  • Used Innocence

    Using experimental narrative structure as his vehicle, Benning recreates the sensationalized and controversial circumstances surrounding Lorencia Bembenek, aka Bambi, former Playboy bunny turned cop, turned accused and convicted killer who disappeared after a daring escape from prison. The film shows the evolution of Benning’s and Bembenek’s relationship, presented through their actual letters read in voice-over, which depict the filmmaker’s curiosity with the subject as it evolves from intrigue to a love obsession.

  • V-2’s Blues

    I selected a fragment of film and, using an optical printer, reprinted it over and over. A few frames at a time, I replaced the image with frames of pure colour. Similarly, on the sound track, I recorded a sentence and replaced it with the letters that spell out the words of the sentence. I was interested in breaking down some basic units of films and writing- the shot and the sentence- into smaller and smaller pieces in a brief, concentrated film. The correspondences between the image and the sentence and the way visual and verbal order disintegrates in the…

  • AIDE MÉMOIRE – ein schwules Gedächtnisprotokoll | AIDE MÉMOIRE – Gay Document For Remembering

    A private discourse between photographer Jurgen Baldiga (1959-1993) and filmmaker Michael Brynntrup; a personal investigation into how to deal with images of life and death.

  • Bird that Chirped on Bathurst, The

    The intermittently heard voice-over talks about a woman’s self-awareness – being unable to know if she has really changed or not. The images are esoteric and hard to interpret: young women in black in various urban settings, something moving rhythmically. A personal, yet intriguing film.

  • Valentin de las Sierras

    Skin, eyes, knees, horses, hair, sun, earth. Old song of Mexican hero, Valentin, sung by blind Jose Santollo Nadiso en Santa Cruz de la Soledad.