The porcupine and the wolf converse in a forest underwood where light literally strobes through the trees. The porcupine delights in the clicks of her quills when she walks. When the wolf attempts to compete, she cleverly works him into a duet and all is well until the two are perturbed by a bee. An animated film which takes a subtle look at sources of aggression.
Filter Films
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“My Own Obsession” is a film interested in the implications of identity and the archeology of those mental layers that represent our identities. It is a journey through the identity of an Armenian-Canadian woman during a specific period, which is documented through interviews with various individuals about their encounters and experiences with the protagonist. The line between documentary and fiction is blurred. The cinematic impact unfolds into poetic visual metaphors, which weave themselves throughout the film. It is a film which explores the relationship of the viewer to the film. An unknown archivist/filmmaker structures the cinematic experience through the guise of a traditional documentary. The interviews with various characters, usually the staple of a traditional documentary, is consciously subverted to confront issues of style and content in relation to the discourse which occurs between the audience and the artistic product; the conventions of documentary are inverted in an ouroboros-like cycle where the film documents as much its own creation and slips between various cinematic codes. The stories that are presented are diverse and only slowly fray away the many veils, which the protagonist has draped herself under. She continuously seduces each character while revealing frustration at her own failed attempt at reconstructing new self-generated identities. The knowledge, which the auxiliary figures posses about the protagonist, is one only of surfaces and illusions, their personalities and experiences become indistinguishable aesthetically, style and content are one and recite simultaneous fictions and realities. They both cloud and clarify the narrative. Notions of foreground and background assimilate themselves into a neutral space, which exemplifies importance only through aesthetic impact, whether auditory or visual. The protagonist is a photographer whose only subject is herself and each pose gazes straight at the viewer/camera. She exists in an egocentric universe, ruled by Narcissus. “My Own Obsession” documents the protagonists’ pathology through her interactions with others and her own images. The cinematic tone chosen for this film is one of psychological discomfort. It is as if the film is being constructed and projected as much in the minds of characters and actors as in the minds of the audience. It is in the relentless ambiguity of the film, which stitches together its elegantly flowering narrative of poetic moments, shots and metaphors. Is the audience privy to the personal? The cinematic forum manufactured by the film both distances the viewer form its stark aggressive aesthetics, but invites curiosity into the friction between each persona.
My Own Obsession
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A documentary about autistic children and the difficult and often trying process of their education. While attending special art classes in a small well-equipped studio, several children are seen during the delicate and inspired moments of learning self-discovery. Here the teachers meet, with great inventiveness and sensitivity, some of the special challenges posed by autistic children and achieve some moving breakthroughs.
As We Are
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What do Demi Moore, Pamela Anderson Lee, and your grandmother have in common? A litany of cunts.
My Cunt
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“My Addiction” is the story of Matt Flynn, a bisexual married man. He hides in the apartment of a young male hooker (Dick Large) claiming to be in love with the boy. He is finally savagely beaten by the young hooker. Matt returns to his wife and vows to love her. They proudly claim negative HIV status and toast their love.
My Addiction
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Part live action and part animation, this is the story of an apartment which “comes alive” when the tenants are away. The chairs throw a party which is interrupted by the return of the “humanoid”… with dire results. Originally intended as an unofficial sequel to Norman McLaren’s film “A Chairy Tale.”
Musical Chairs, The
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Twelve trombonists station themselves around the shore of a wilderness lake. At dawn and dusk, they play meditative music across the water to one another. The quiet and the water allow the sounds to echo back and become part of this piece of wilderness music written by the Canadian composer, R. Murray Schafer. The event, as conceptualized by Schafer, is documented in “Music for Wilderness Lake”. The film shows plans, preparations, and the event itself.
Music for Wilderness Lake
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We all make our own ghosts – we take the people and experiences and events that have affected us the most, and encourage them to haunt us. “Museum” is, on every level, replete with ghosts and hauntings. Penny, the narrator and filmmaker, is obsessed with the impossible task of capturing the ghosts that reside within her life on film (the most literal and unforgiving of mediums). Yet even as she struggles with this mission (one common to many image-takers), her own substance and “realness”are brought into question, as her disembodied voice carries us through the narrative. (CW)
Museum
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“In my novel ‘The Devils’ I attempted to depict the complex and heterogeneous motives which may prompt even the purest of heart and the most naive people to take part in an absolutely monstrous crime.” – Dostoyevsky’s “The Diary of a Writer” “‘Murder Psalm’ is a vision of blood on the tracks, a response to the daily diet of T.V. death, to death in the raw, to childhood terror … a dense texture of swiftly crossing viewpoints, image placed against image, in a film of impassioned intensity.” – A. L. Rees, British Film Institute
Murder Psalm
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“Multiple Choice” uses offbeat humour to explore the theme of poverty in the consumer society. The film tells the story of Meg Harris, a compulsive shopper who is coming to grips with her high-consumption lifestyle.
Multiple Choice
