Genres: documentary

  • Night Garden

    This personal short film uses a series of telephone conversations with the filmmaker’s mother as she tries to reconcile facing cancer for a fourth time. Low-fi video filmed at night captures her mothers bond to her home, shaping the tension and isolation of living life with a terminal illness. Nocturnal lush garden imagery also evokes private reflection, and in one final moment, proposes a provocative question about time.

  • Vanilla

    Vanilla takes you through the everyday ordinary life of a disabled senior citizen living in Ottawa, Canada. It is a portrait documenting aging and the loneliness of those suffering in silence. The black and white film was shot on 16mm Bolex film camera using a KODAK 7222 Double-X Negative film. Processed by Niagara Film Lab (Toronto). Created as part of Independent Filmmakers Co-operative of Ottawa (IFCO) – Dogme Production Challenge.

  • ARTIFACT (circa 2006)

    The archaeology of Identity. Consider a world where all human communications are represented by numbers, a digital world. Imagine a future archaeologist finding a DV cassette from hundreds of years ago (a real found object, circa 2006, full length and uncut). Imagine trying to decode this ancient digital object, codecs unknown, obsolete, hardware long lost. Crack the code? Available algorithms scan, databases compare, construct, deconstruct, reconstruct the artifact. 2006, the dawn of self-by-numbers, digitized identity. What human fragments, fugitive narratives, remain? Do we have a future history? What will the algorithms decide? All bookings of this film include a free…

  • Fresh Blood: A Consideration of Belonging

    “Fresh Blood” is a hybrid documentary blending personal narrative and a video-essay style. The piece engages issues of Jewish racialized identity, Arab/Jewish dichotomies and the ways these come together in Iraqi Jewish culture, and the personal implications of the politics of Palestine and of the Jewish holocaust. The artist returns to a land of remembering and forgetting. With her first language lost it is difficult to communicate with her grandmother, and yet there is humour and poignancy in their resulting exchanges. In seeking out her biological father, Yael questions the significance of blood relations. She revisits and revises family memory…

  • They Looked at Me and I Smiled

    Artists who use their bodies as their medium or canvas while existing in their natural environments. Are they performing? Do their performances end after the makeup is removed? Can a performance continue in an empty apartment instead of in front of an audience?

  • Take Me To Prom

    Featuring intimate, charming interviews with queer people ranging in age from 88 to 17, “Take Me To Prom” invites audiences to revisit an iconic adolescent milestone while telling a story of social change that spans more than 70 years. Image description: A smiling elderly person dressed in a white shirt and grey bowtie sits in a wheelchair, against a backdrop of frilled curtains. Rounds of sparkling light fall over the image.

  • God Straightens Legs

    Filmmaker Joële Walinga documents a moment of faith and waiting in the life of her Christian mother, a French-Canadian living in the Bible Belt who has opted to forgo cancer treatment.

  • The Quoddy Fold

    “The Quoddy Fold” is an intimate interaction between a woman and a derelict coastal house. In this one-hour film Phillips dismantles and studies the movement from wood to dust, damp paper to mold, and ponders the house folding back into the land and sea. Phillips’ performance constantly seeks evidence of dissolving boundaries, thingness, history and intersubjectivity of space, place and species. Through the poetics of the ruin “The Quoddy Fold” is an interrogation of dwelling and landscape giving space to entertain the ecological, cultural and societal anxieties surrounding impermanence.

  • ENG Europe

    In 1972, experimental dancer/choreographer Lily Eng and visual artist/filmmaker Peter Dudar created a partnership called Missing Associates. They initiated the first wave of experimental dance in Toronto galleries, then performed coast to coast in North America. And at a time when Europe was split by a physical and cultural “iron curtain,” Missing Associates showed in venues on both sides of that divide, establishing a vital, ongoing presence for Canadian experimental dance and performance art within the international scene. Eng Europe is Dudar’s chronicle of Lily Eng’s European performances. Lily Eng used deeply exploratory movement techniques, plus hardcore performance art concepts.…

  • Contents

    An old wallet, abandoned intact, kept for unknown reasons. Uncorroborated memories of a close (but distant) relation. How are these documents speaking to each other? What is the nature of their harmony? Official versus living memory: each useless, unstable, disintegrating. Is memory the bureaucracy of the self? How does it order our lives?