Seventy-year-old Daisy Graham is having a hard day. No one in her small town wants to let her forget about the big ceremony tomorrow, a ceremony at the local high school in her honour. But Daisy has more important things to think about than some ceremony – she’s dug out her old rifle, now all she needs is a box of bullets. Jury Prize, Best Female Short, Philadelphia Int’l Gay & Lesbian Film Festival World Premiere at 2007 Toronto International Film Festival Special Jury Mention at Image+Nation, Montreal “A subtle and touching portrait” – Barrett Hooper, NOW Magazine
Filter Films
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A few days before moving to Spain, Ryan learns that he might be HIV positive. This situation will force him to deal with his boyfriend and his worse fear: loneliness. “Portrait of a couple” talks about the lack of trust between two lovers in a difficult moment. The dilemma is approached through the fear we all share of being sick and dying alone. The movie addresses the topic of a gay couple learning about their HIV status, from a particularly different perspective, not in a condescending or victimizing way, but allowing human nature to surface with all its flaws and imperfections.
Portrait of a Couple
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In this film, Winkler confronts the subject of the Australian aborigine through the intercutting of footage from a contemporary aborigine political demonstration with images of the past: cave drawings, the sacred Ayers Rock and the head of an old warrior. Through assertive zoom and pan shots of the rally, Winkler achieves a sense of extraordinary energy, of a generation of people coming out of oppression.
Dark
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Told in a collage of sound and vision, “Oh you pretty things” chronicles the enchantment and disintegration of a relationship built on very different and questionable drives. Recounted through the experiences of two nameless characters in metropolitan New York, the minimal dialogue, ambient moods, engaging narration and sweeping music that make up “Oh, you pretty things” allow the observer to interpret the unique synergy of couples and the varying perception each person has to a shared situation. The ensuing emotional complexity ultimately asks the question: What is love?
Oh, You Pretty Things
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A story-starved filmmaker wakes up in the most dangerous neighborhood in New Orleans with a hot stranger he doesn’t remember meeting. As he begins to try to put together the events of the previous evening, events start to turn more sinister.
Getting Lucky
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“Echo” recalls childhood and the native home of the filmmaker through image, song and text. This self-portrait hints at the fragments, the pieces, the painful and repressed shards that the self contains, and through which it strives to piece together and illuminate its mysterious gaps. “‘Echo’ by Izabella Pruska-Oldenhof boldly explores homesickness and cultural yearning through visual imagery, song and text. In this atypical self-portrait, the artist has created a photogram of her body that acts as a travelling matte through the countryside of her native land as she mouths an old Polish immigrant’s song; the original recording pierces like an arrow through the distance of time.” – Andréa Picard, Toronto International Film Festival The photogram piece used as a matte for this film is ideally presented in the venue as a companion piece. Please note that the first 6 min. of the film are silent. Selected screenings: Wavelengths Programme, Toronto International Film Festival, Toronto, ON, 2007
Echo
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“Pulsions” explores the fluidity of space and time through its emphasis on pulsing movement. “Pulsions” is a companion piece to “fugitive l(i)ght” (2005). The two films grew out of one project that aimed to explore the double ellipse/figure “8” that is created through the movements of living bodies, namely humans, birds and insects, underwater and in the air. Music by Colin Clark. Dance (choreography and performance) by Lucie Mongrain. Selected screenings: Alucine Festival, Toronto, ON, 2007; Nuit Blanche, Toronto, ON, 2007; WNDX Festival, Winnipeg Cinematheque, Winnipeg, MB, 2007; Warsaw Media Festival, Poland, 2007
Pulsions
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A young Chinese woman challenged by identity and history, but enchanted with retro filmmaking in a digital world, makes a life decision – to purchase a vintage, hand-crank movie camera. The camera recalls images of wacky “Hollywood Chinatowns” from Hollywood films made in Colonialist times. While examining it, and dreaming of becoming a cameraman herself, she discovers the marks of former Chinese owners, and she envisions historical scenes that the camera may have seen in China. Her wishes are fulfilled as she films the streets of her own hood, in Toronto’s Asian community.
Shadow Tracing
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This short experimental film mirrors 21st century issues of social deconstruction in everday urban life. Produced in Toronto, during that summer of the London UK transit bombings, it echoes calls for solutions to a threatened, “Homeland” and the notion of security itself. “Regard” plays with impressions of cognizance, consciousness, witnessing, and surveillance in the metroplis, where the passage of human beings through industrialized urban space/time is obversed. Connotations of danger lurk in trains, buses, streetcars, subway/communter trains, and automobile traffic, while bicycles and pedestrains weave sinous paths through the city. A well-intentioned fabric of vulnerability emerges, its irony punctuated by “designer” anti-suicide nets, recently found necessary on the Toronto viaduct bridge, traversed day and night by trains, cars and people. “Regard” is haunted by the impossibility of “temporal reversal” and another chnace to make things just.
Regard
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Inspired in part by a poem by Toronto poet Ryan Kamstra, “the acrobat” is a consideration of the relationship of gravity and politics – the beauty and necessity of rising up, but also, perhaps, the significance of allowing oneself to fall. If the force of gravity is in relation to both mass and proximity, how does the force of politics resonate across space and time?
acrobat, the
