Genres: experimental

  • Urban Peasants

    The first section of the film consists of a no-image sound-track recording of a Yiddish language course that teaches us those expressions that will come in handy when we are far from home and need a toilet or a postage stamp. As Jacobs points out, there is of course, no country where Yiddish is a native language. There are pockets of elder citizens in various countries who speak it, as the members of the family whom we see later in the film do, but it is essentially an extinct language, the product of an oral tradition and only as a…

  • Use Once and Destroy

    Sketches about three heroin addicts in Montreal by ex-junkie filmmaker John L’Ecuyer. A stream-of-consciousness narration sails the viewer through Montreal’s underworld of characters: Red Theo, a dealer that treats his clients like family despite all the difficulties inherent in such a lifestyle; Nice Guy Nelson, a heroin addict that sought escape from reality by any means necessary, including auto-mutilation; and Brenda, a young woman at one time loved life but fell into the netherworld of heroin addiction, prostitution and AIDS.

  • Used Innocence

    Using experimental narrative structure as his vehicle, Benning recreates the sensationalized and controversial circumstances surrounding Lorencia Bembenek, aka Bambi, former Playboy bunny turned cop, turned accused and convicted killer who disappeared after a daring escape from prison. The film shows the evolution of Benning’s and Bembenek’s relationship, presented through their actual letters read in voice-over, which depict the filmmaker’s curiosity with the subject as it evolves from intrigue to a love obsession.

  • V-2’s Blues

    I selected a fragment of film and, using an optical printer, reprinted it over and over. A few frames at a time, I replaced the image with frames of pure colour. Similarly, on the sound track, I recorded a sentence and replaced it with the letters that spell out the words of the sentence. I was interested in breaking down some basic units of films and writing- the shot and the sentence- into smaller and smaller pieces in a brief, concentrated film. The correspondences between the image and the sentence and the way visual and verbal order disintegrates in the…

  • AIDE MÉMOIRE – ein schwules Gedächtnisprotokoll | AIDE MÉMOIRE – Gay Document For Remembering

    A private discourse between photographer Jurgen Baldiga (1959-1993) and filmmaker Michael Brynntrup; a personal investigation into how to deal with images of life and death.

  • Bird that Chirped on Bathurst, The

    The intermittently heard voice-over talks about a woman’s self-awareness – being unable to know if she has really changed or not. The images are esoteric and hard to interpret: young women in black in various urban settings, something moving rhythmically. A personal, yet intriguing film.

  • Valentin de las Sierras

    Skin, eyes, knees, horses, hair, sun, earth. Old song of Mexican hero, Valentin, sung by blind Jose Santollo Nadiso en Santa Cruz de la Soledad.

  • Vancouver Art Show

    The dictionary defines art as the product of a skill to create, a definition implying the importance of human skill over that of nature. To my thinking, art is not so much found in the “greatness” of creation; rather, it is a testament to our power to define. In the four sections of the film, two are defined as “art” and are accessible as such. The opening title acts as a prologue for the first section, which is an example of abstract expressionism. The definition of art, combined with the voice of a tour guide, similarly strengthens the reception of…

  • VARIATIONS ON A CELLOPHANE WRAPPER

    “The basic image is a female factory worker unrolling a large sheet of cellophane… The film resembles a painting floating through time, its subject disappearing and re-emerging in various degrees of abstraction.” – Kristine Nordstrom, The Village Voice

  • Verite

    An autobiographical dramatic exhibition of the inherent conflict between film and reality. Cinema verité and conventional narrative forms weave the viewer toward a further understanding of the mirror-like worlds of a filmmaker’s personal and cinematic lives.