Genres: documentary

  • Artist Spotlight Series: Roberto Ariganello

    Available for purchase in the CFMDC Shop: https://www.cfmdc.org/shop. Roberto Ariganello was a passionate believer in the importance of independent film. Working in a variety of styles and genres, he experimented with narrative and documentary form, playfully exploring the use of appropriated imagery and the relationship between sound and picture. His solo and collaborative films offer humorous and thoughtful alternatives to the conventions of mainstream media and consumer culture. Study guide includes an essay by James Missen. 1) Yesterday’s Wine 2) Shelter 3) Non-Zymase Pentathlon 4) Contrafacta 5) Loteria 6) Gesture

  • This Time Last Year

    On Thanksgiving of 2001, Daniel set her video camera to run while she and her family got ready to pose for a photograph. One year later, she turns the footage, together with notes from the same time, into a portrait of all that is no longer there. “Daniel explores loss as something sensed, felt and lived with in this poetic portrait of the absences we feel in the moments we capture on film.” – Images Festival 2003

  • Parenthesis

    A simple inadvertent sequence of a few unassuming moments ends up feeling somehow sad and somehow beautiful. How this happens is hard to say. It has something to do with the interplay between what we can and cannot see, the incidental tensions underlying each small moment, the figures forming and reforming on the side.

  • Confessions of a Compulsive Archivist

    Built from artifacts recovered from her own then her mother’s storage closet, “Confessions of a Compulsive Archivist” follows the filmmaker’s tragic-comic struggle to let go of a few things of obviously no use to her. Part found footage film, part camera-less video, it turns stuff that should have been thrown out long ago into a poignant study of the relationship between the creative imagination and our attachments, be they material or emotional. “[One of] about a dozen superlative selections by women, [and an example of] an intriguing crop of new video works examining the medium’s widespread, elemental function as a…

  • Cuentos de Mi Ninez (Tales from My Childhood)

    “In 1973, General Augusto Pinochet launched a violent coup in Chile that overthrew the Marxist elected president Salvador Allende. Thousands were killed, tortured, imprisoned, and exiled as a result. My family was among the many that were exiled in Canada.” – Francisca Duran In this experimental, autobiographical film, a young woman remembers and recounts difficult childhood memories of the 1973 coup in Chile when her family was forced into exile.

  • Two Hummingbirds

    A beautifully understated work that creates an almost palpable sense of absence through a simple interplay of word and image.

  • Pictures of Things That Aren’t There

    “Pictures of Things That Aren’t There” is an anthology of six works loosely tied together by the circumstance of their making: all were initiated while Daniel was caring for her mother as she lived out her life with a disease that erodes the frontal and temporal lobes of the brain. Her mother’s illness is never more than peripherally addressed. Daniel attends instead to the unnoticed workings of the creative imagination – the capacity of mind she believed her mother had lost. They are small works, made for one person and offered to anyone else who cares to appreciate them. Aesthetic…

  • In the Kingdom of Shadows

    “In the Kingdom of Shadows” documents a paragraph being typeset on an early twentieth-century Ludlow Linecaster. The text is taken from Maxim Gorky’s 1896 review of the Lumiere Brothers’ film “Arrival of the Train at La Ciotat” (1895). As the words melt into a pool of lead, the alchemical magic of printing is linked to that of cinema. Commissioned by LIFT (Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto) for their 25th anniversary program, “Film is Dead! Long Live Film!” Selected screenings: Ann Arbor Film Festival, 2007; Toronto Worldwide Short Film Festival, 2007

  • Her name was Violet

    A simple pairing of fire footage and a photograph from the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, “Her name was Violet” pays homage to a girl who once had her whole life in front of her. This short piece reflects on the act of photographing to remember, the fragile nature of life, and the power of the earth’s elements. Commissioned by LIFT (Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto) for their 25th anniversary program, “Film is Dead! Long Live Film!” Selected screenings: Cinematheque Ontario, Toronto, ON, 2007; Toronto Worldwide Short Film Festival, 2007

  • Shut Up Barbie

    The film is a reaction to the obsession a seven-year-old girl has with her many Barbie Dolls. The world of Barbie is pushed to its innocuous and tragic conclusions. Ann Knutson plays the role of the mother. “Shut Up Barbie” was pixilated in Tiburon, Ca.