Genres: documentary

  • Almanac, The

    A 52-week film cycle shot with a vintage 35mm hand-cranked camera and processed entirely by hand. The project is a survey of essential human rituals that have not changed in thousands of years and the contemporary landscapes against which these rituals continue to be carried out. Loosely structured around the milestones reached during the first year of a child’s life, it is an examination of the human condition though the lens of 19th-century technology.

  • 1000 Feet

    A walk through the city of Maputo becomes a poetic visual essay. Inspired by two Mozambican poems, its central themes are: shoes, time, space, history, humanity, reading the asphalt and the intrusive effect of a camera. Scenes from everyday life and a series of portraits link with radio loops and local ambiance sound. The curious gaze of a foreigner gradulally evolves to the fascinated look of a gues enchanted by the city and its people. Strangeness, obstruction and mutual unease are step by step replaced by contact and communication. Distance and closeness measured in feet: the theme for a possible…

  • Cri du Silence, Le

    “Le Cri du Silence” follows Jean-Marc Dalpe step-by-step through his life and his experiences in Penetanguishene, Sudbury, Toronto, Rockland, Ottawa, and many more cities and villages. The film presents a portrait of the author and playwright, of this world and the Franco-Ontarian community. Dalpe’s poetry and plays reflect the conflicts, passions, and fears of those he has encountered. From Snoopy Dufour, the biker of the Amoco strike, to Therese Groleau, who inspired Dalpe’s play “Hawkesbury Blues,” “Le Cri du Silence” presents precious testimonies and stirs the memories of those who have felt the Dalpe effect so intensely. Note: French Language

  • Imprint

    “Louise Bourque’s ‘Imprint’ focuses obsessively on home-movie images of her family’s house, which seems gloomily oppressive, almost filling the frame; she repeats the images with various alterations – tinted, bleached, partly scraped away – as if attacking the place, turning its darkness into light.” – Fred Camper, The Reader, Chicago, April 16 1999 “‘Imprint’… throttles and exhausts a particular memory-image (a family on a porch in an ambiguous position – good-bye/hello, reuniting/reinforcing/celebrating?) and traces its corrosion and dissolution even as it intensifies it physically. Dyes, zip-a-toning, a weird daguerrotype shiny effect, and ripping makes for a very concrete trip.” –…

  • Fissures

    A film about forgetting and remembering, about past presences and the traces they leave. In making this piece, Bourque literally distorted the personal home movie images appearing on the film plane through various manipulations in the process of doing her own low-tech contact printing. The images warp and fluctuate, creating a distorted space of fleeting apparitions, like re-surfacing memories. The footage was hand-processed and solarized as well as hand-coloured through toning. “A very short film that meshes the beautifully overlapping style of Bruce Baillie with rhythm and sound to create a meditation in blue.” – Stephen Brophy, artsMedia, March15 –…

  • Jours en fleurs

    “Jours en fleurs” is a reclamation of flower-power in which images of trees in springtime bloom are subjected to the floriferous ravages of menarcheal substance in a gestation of decay. The title is based on an expression from my coming-of-age in Acadian French Canada where girls would refer to having their menstrual periods as “être dans ses fleurs.” As a result of incubation in menstrual blood for several months, the original images inscribed on the emulsion undergo violent alterations. The shedding of the unfertilized womb depredates the fertilized blossoms and substitutes its own dark beauty. – LB “Those few shorts…

  • Self Portrait Post Mortem

    An unearthed time capsule consisting of footage of the maker’s youthful self – an “exquisite corpse” with nature as collaborator. Bourque buried random out-takes from her first three films (all staged productions dealing with her family) in the backyard of her ancestral home (adjoining the grounds of a former cemetery) with the ambivalent intentions of both safe-keeping and unloading them (she was relocating). Upon examining the footage five years later she found that the material contained images of herself captured during the making of her first film. That discovery seemed handed over like a gift and prompted the making of…

  • Just Words

    “Using as it’s text Samuel Beckett’s ‘Not I,’ this shocking gift incorporates optically printed home movie footage and an eerily slick close-up of actress Patricia MacGeachy as she rants at lightening speed Beckett’s words about home, family and the confines and alienation associated with being a woman.” – Program notes, Madcat Film Festival, San Francisco, 2001 “A 10-minute tour de force […]. In ‘Just Words,’ Bourque intercuts footage of her mother and her sisters with a performance by actress Patricia MacGeachy of Samuel Beckett’s ‘Not I’; the result is unnerving (as all Beckett is) yet touching (as some Beckett is…

  • Seven Secrets to Perfect Porn, The

    In 2001 the law in the UK for gay porn changed forever. Up until then, the only porn gay men in the UK could enjoy would be illegal, bad quality material mainly from Europe and America. Even up until 2003 certain sexual acts were still illegal in gay porn, whilst their straight counterpart movies still enjoyed greater freedom in sexual expression. Now that has all changed and films can be produced and sold freely in the UK and a new industry is starting to emerge. “The Seven Secrets to Perfect Porn” follows the work of Max Lincoln, who took the…

  • Stars Are Ruined, The

    “‘The Stars Are Ruined’ features 22 local Toronto glitterarti filmed in glorious Super 8. A moment in time. A performance. A filmed document made with love. Dedicated to the stars of the past, present and future.” (KC)