Genres: documentary

  • Hoolboom

    “Hoolboom” is a film that Arts Toronto commissioned local filmmaker Wrik Mead to make based on his impressions of fellow filmmaker Mike Hoolboom. With some collaboration from Mike, Wrik has produced a film about the body, self-awareness, and the art of film.

  • Before It Blows

    As we watch through a tourist’s video camera for the Old Faithful geyser to erupt, visitors stand just outside the frame and vent their own desires and frustrations on one another. The anxious videographer and his helpful wife; the dazzled mother with her cynical teenaged son; the pontifical father and his overmodulated daughter; and the couple who have just decided to separate – as the geyser finally erupts, each of them explodes in their own way. “One of Canada’s most imaginative experimental filmmakers (her other acclaimed films include Sifted Evidence, Low Visibility, Ley Lines) returns with a concise, amusing and…

  • Entonces Bueno

    Havana, Cuba. A man and a pig lead the way through this series of nine brief portraits of Cuban artists. A mixed-media short film composed of 16 mm, animated 35 mm stills, Super 8, interviews and sounds recorded in Havana. An image maker spends a month in Havana. There he meets a few visual artists with whom he talks about the kinds of ideas that motivate their art. Through this, the filmmaker creates metaphors of the exterior world these eight artists’ experience.

  • TRANSIT: Adventures of a Boy in the Big City

    A young Berliner reflects on how the radical changes to Berlin’s architecture and flow influences the emergence of his transgenderism. Ati walks through the city and shows the locations and spaces which help shape his daily life. Cruising in the Tiergarten, going shopping for suits or hardware, getting ready to dance foxtrot in Cafe Fatale, Berlin’s “queer carousel,” on Sunday night. A portrait of a thoughtful boy confronting the incompletion of both his body and his city.

  • Vision from the Edge: Breyten Breytenbach Painting the Lines

    “Listen: this is the sum of my life: I travelled all the regions where peaks are looking glasses for the absent face of God and shadows are unknown there except when whispering under the sods.” Quite the contrary of a “social documentary,” this film offers glimpses of a man who has spent his life away from the “mainstream,” with his specific, his very own Vision from the Edge. September, the Frans Hals Museum in Haarlem, the Netherlands: Breyten Breytebach, poet, painter and anti-Apartheid activist, creates six panels/scrolls which will hang from the ceiling of the exhibition. These are part of…

  • Poem from South Africa

    May 4 1997. The first international poetry festival in South Africa. At the seaport of Durban, Natal province, chaired by Breyten Breytenbach, painter/poet/writer. Thirteen poets came from all over the world to meet, speak with, and listen to their South African counterparts. To see for themselves the “New South Africa” with its freshly-found freedom and its deeply-rooted inequalities. Between readings and excursions, discoveries and exchanges, the film weaves a collective visual journal of a land haunted by painful memories and uncertain of promised future. All the while, a reflection on exile, censorship, unfinished struggles and the absolute necessity of poetic…

  • My Grandma’s Boyfriend

    A short documentary that explores love after 80. When Verna met Patrick, she was a 70-year-old widow and he was a 73-year-old separated Irish man. All it took was a spot dance, a bottle of wine, and one year to bring them together. Eleven years of happiness in eleven minutes.

  • Our Hiroshima

    Setsuko Nakamura Thurlow, a relentless campaigner for peace, sets the tone of “Our Hiroshima”. She was thirteen when the first atomic bomb destroyed her city and killed several members of her family. By interspersing Setsuko’s vivid, eyewitness testimony with archival footage from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Anton Wagner brings alive the reality of an unimaginable horror. This film also takes a long look at the US Army’s determination to test the new weapon before the end of the war, and delves deeply into the essential roles played by the Canadian government, uranium industry, and scientists in the Manhattan Project. In the…

  • El Valley Centro

    “In a media age dominated by rapid-fire imagery and pounding sound tracks, it is rejuvenating to encounter a film that invites the viewer to find rapture and meaning in the details of a single quiet frame. Veteran experimental filmmaker James Benning extends such an invitation as he turns his meditative gaze toward California’s Great Central Valley in his exceptionally beautiful film, ‘El Valley Centro.’ Employing natural sound and contemplative proscenium shots, Benning skillfully composes a series of pure and majestic images that at once evoke a sense of nostalgic splendor as well as deliver a subtle, yet penetrating, political commentary.…

  • human tragedy on a grand scale/never confuse movement with action

    Two films on one tape. In September 1998, Kerr released “never confuse movement with action,” a post-modern biography of Patrick Hemingway (a grandson of Ernest Hemingway). July 1999 was the centenary of Ernest Hemingway. There would be the publication of yet another posthumous novel. The Hemingway family hired a merchandising agent – Ernest Hemingway was now a brand name. The trust fund was secured for future generations.1999 was Ernest Hemingway’s year. But when Patrick Hemingway saw “never confuse movement with action,” he was less than pleased. Worried about his father’s reaction, a lawyer was hired and injunction threatened against the…