“Autoplastic” intimately explores perceived psychosis in store front manikins.
Filter Films
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Greg Sells has been described as the “Rain Man” of women’s music. Some assume he is autistic. Some think he is a deviant. The female musicians accept him, so why does everyone else want to label him? Featuring: Patrice Pike, Terri Lord, Gretchen Phillips, Ginger Leigh, Sara Hickman, Shelley King and Dayna Kurtz
Greg
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The fifth film in THE BOOK OF ALL THE PRAISE cycle. “‘The Young Prince’ film is my current project, and is based on alchemical themes. The film is about transformations – about transformations of imagery, about history as transformation, about eros as a transformative power, about that old Eisensteinian idea of collage and montage as transformation, but most of all, about transformations of the self. “The film combines two sorts of transformations: electrical transformations, produced by digital image processing, and chemical transformations, produced by processing the film by hand, in small batches. Thus, it is a dialogue between two technologies, the older chemical/mechanical technology of the era that gave birth to the cinema, and the new electronic/digital computing technology more commonly associated with video – a dialogue between what was and what is yet to be.” – Bruce Elder
Young Prince, The
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“An inventive exploration of the visceral nature of sound and how we learned to capture and reproduce it over time. Anchored by the discovery of the phonograph by the brilliant-and deaf-inventor Thomas Edison, this visual and conceptual collage of rich archival footage and animation playfully traces the birth of technological reproduction and the beginnings of our modern, audio-drenched world.” – Gisèle Gordon (Hot Docs Canadian Spectrum programmer) Selected Screenings: Canadian Spectrum, HotDocs, 2008; DOK Leipzig Festival, 2008
Mr. Edison’s Ear
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Kids on TV and Johannes Zits have together created a music video art piece based on Johannes’ visual work and the song “In Every Dream Home a Heartache” performed by Kids on TV. The video takes the song’s plotline of a rich man falling in love with a rubber doll and uses it to critique queer consumerism and the advertising industry’s targeting of the gay-demographic — turning peoples desires into a fetishization of newly built condos and lavish funishings. The rubber doll is portrayed by KOTV member John Caffery is covered with green-screen paint and super-imposed with gay male pornography by Johannes. KOTV’s Minus Smile sings the part of the protagonist whose alienation eventually drives him mad with affection for the artificial playmate. The barren white space in which the wandering plot occurs is ambiguously superimposed with advertising, store-room furnishings and palatial homes from architecture magazines — leaving the viewer to wonder how imaginary his dreamhome is.
In Every Dream Home a Heartache
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“Cut” is a short animated film about a woman who gets a haircut on lunch and gets more than she bargained for.
Cut
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“I believe that filmmakers in the future will have to establish an archaeological approach to their subject matter. Instead of photographing images, we may have to dig them from the ground, and paste them together – film will look like today’s Dead Sea Scrolls.” – Steven Woloshen
Chronicle Re-Constructions
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“Not That Kind of Christian!!” is a feature documentary that explores gay and lesbian Christians’ struggle for acceptance in the Episcopal Church, the “schism” their activism threatens to bring to worldwide Anglicanism, and the ways in which activists such as these can shape our personal liberties at the highest institutional levels. While the film celebrates the achievements made by queer Anglicans as they fight to transform an oppressive Christian tradition into a modern force of liberation, it never excuses the prejudices and abuses of organized religion, particularly in an era when the word “faith” is merely code for the nationalistic and homophobic violence organized religion often fosters. As the film’s devoutly Christian (and male) interviewees offer an internal critique of Christian patriarchy, the film ultimately implies that our best cure for homophobia should may from within the Church, the institution most responsible for propagating homophobia.
Not That Kind of Christian!!
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TALKING PORTRAITS is a 2-disk compilation of the following films: YOU 16mm, 1990, 15 min., sound YOU is an imaginary fictionalized you in a whimsical space. It is the still live residue of the broken relationship Lisa is here confronting. A parallel actor, the film is in the business of reinterpreting. Director’s Choice, Black Maria Film and Video Festival, 1990 OUT IN THE GARDEN 16mm, 1991, 15 min., sound Set in and around the house and garden of a middle-aged upstate New York academic, Grenier’s intimate experimental documentary portrait explores, in an innovative form, the thoughts and feelings of one man dealing with AIDS. Michael Moore Award for Best Documentary, Ann Arbor Film Festival, 1992; Best Experimental Documentary, 16th Atlanta Film & Video Festival, 1992 FEET Video, 1994, 29 min., B&W, sound A portrait of an intimate friend of the artist – Susan Weisser – and her relationships with her 13-year-old son Billy, and 17-year-old daughter, Amanda. The author asked them to reconstruct their daily rituals. The results were enactments, accounts, confidences and arguments that freely crisscross each other with the dynamic created by the presence of the video artist and his “unobtrusive” Hi-8 camera. Surprising events ensue within evocative framings of sounds and images, and the enchanted constructions from the fanciful revelations of the everyday. Second prize, Black Maria Film & Video Festival, 1996
Talking Portraits
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If you’re a Torontonian, and hip to the fat revolution, you can’t have missed the recent explosion of the Fat Femme Mafia. Call them what you want. Large and in charge. Larger than life. These women have been hitting the city with the strong words of politics of size. During the inception of the Mafia, we could only gossip with possibilities. Soon there were rumours, whispers, and boisterous claims about the phenomenal event that was to be Chubb Rubb: A Fat Cabaret. This short documentary follows the Fat Femme Mafia, their fat co-conspirators and allies in the days leading up to their first and highly anticipated event. Through interviews, asides, and performances, “Rubb My Chubb” lays the groundwork for these fierce fatties to continue to make their politics known to the rest of the world. Since then, FFM have graced the cover of Xtra! Magazine, MTV, The Toronto Star, and many Pride performance stages, and the appetite for these luscious ladies continues to grow and grow.
Rubb My Chubb
