Genres: documentary

  • Miracle & The Making of a Miracle, A

    “A Miracle” is the first-ever music video featuring Toronto-based “Gay Folk Church Music” ensemble The Hidden Cameras. “The Making of a Miracle”, shot simultaneously on video and Super 8, is a companion piece featuring behind-the-scenes hijinks during the production.

  • Echoes

    A woman reflects on the off-beat moments and stirrings of girlhood experiences that shaped her life. Available on DVD on the compilation “Artist Spotlight Series: Michelle Mohabeer.”

  • Garden in Khorkhom

    “Garden in Khorkhom” is an impressionistic documentary inspired by the works of Armenian-American painter Arshile Gorky. The film is a tapestry of footage provided by Atom Egoyan’s “Ararat” and footage shot by Torossian. It is an homage to Arshile Gorky, focusing on his relationship to Armenian art and his mother.

  • Ride

    “Ride” was filmed during the Friends for Life Bike Rally, an annual fundraiser for the Toronto People with AIDS Foundation (www.pwatoronto.org). It was filmed entirely with a Super 8 camera pipe-clamped to the bicycle basket of Leif Harmsen’s Canadian Tire Special, over 700 km between Toronto and Montreal. The blissful and high energy six-day event whips the many riders into top shape and inspires many others to generously support a great charity. It also connects two of Canada’s greatest cities with simple, environmentally friendly pedal power.

  • Penetration

    There has never been a better medium/content match in the entire history of art. Video and porn were made for each other. Sick of all the documentaries about the making of porn movies, Harmsen gets down to the folks who actually use it. Guest voices include Belle Isabelle and her boyfriend Sam, sex columnist and performer Sasha, UK performance artist Charlie Pulford, playwright and poet Sky Gilbert, and Super 8 master Peggy Anne Burton. Made at Trinity Square Video as part of the Tranz Sex Tech residency.

  • Malled

    Follow Tyler, an incredibly well-dressed beacon of young queerness, through the midwestern mall where she works. She tries to sort out her future while surrounded by dancing girls, beauty queen children, and constant consuming.

  • Beat Truths: A Portrait of Graeme Kirkland

    Based on autobiographical writings, “Beat Truths: A Portrait of Graeme Kirkland” is a 3-minute film that aims to capture the dynamics of the artist’s street performance. It is a marriage of spoken word, street samples and drumming to cinema verite-style filming, creating a collage of sound and vision which builds to a cacophony that captures the essence and honesty of the artist and his art. Never subtle nor sugar-coated, and always in your face.

  • No Soy un Oso (I Am Not a Bear)

    An interview and a debate over what makes the man a bear and why he would resist belonging to a group of big hairy men.

  • If You Lived Here, You’d Be Home By Now

    “If You Lived Here, You’d Be Home By Now” is about the divisiveness over land, the relationship of public and private space in small-town America, and the concept of home. Using documentary strategies, landscape stills are juxtaposed to stories “ripped from the headlines” of a small-town newspaper. The struggle over public space described in the stories reflects universal concepts of space, privacy and property ownership.

  • Past Perfect

    “Past Perfect” is a spirited meditation on the elusiveness and inaccessibility of (Jewish) history as conveyed through sightseeing tours of “Jewish” Poland, a grandmother’s recollection of life in America during War II, and memoir-like “last moments” of a great aunt believed to have died in Treblinka. Shot almost entirely in contemporary Poland, “Past Perfect” lyrically portrays the relentless yet ultimately futile attempt to resuscitate a history literally gone up in smoke. “It is not entirely out of line to call ‘Past Perfect’- filmmaker Cynthia Madansky’s meditation on Jewish history, notably the Shoah – spirited and darkly amusing. After all, Madansky’s…