Monsoon St., ’77 tells the story of a day in the life of a young tomboy, Tina, who finds escapism in the rural desert of Arizona in 1977. To compensate for her unhappy surroundings, Tina lives in a rich imaginative world. She finds beauty in the natural landscape and comforts herself by summoning familiar figures from popular culture. These fantasies supply the happiness that is otherwise so lacking in her everyday life.
Filter Films
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“Vincent Grenier is an artist whose shift to digital filmmaking has consistently been characterized by a rigorous investigation of the specific aesthetics and formal parameters of his adopted medium. ‘This, and This’ is no exception. Thematically, Grenier’s piece is a conversation with nature in both its raw and culturally mediated forms – for example, the rushing waters from Ithaca Falls juxtaposed with the spray of a rain puddle traversed by a steel belted radial. The piece is in many ways a meditation on the power of the straight cut, as opposed to the fades and image-alternations one often finds in recent video work. As the video progresses, Grenier implies that non-mediation doesn’t exist. But on an even more basic level, ‘This, and This’ pits vertical against horizontal movement, as well as pushing digital video to the limits of its comfort zones, as swirling forms begin to pixilate or produce visual feedback.” – Michael Sichinski
This, and This
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In a therapeutic cinematic session of sorts, a gay son introduces his ex-lovers to his father – while examining his own fascination with the father figure.
Parricide Sessions, The
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Using borrowed clips from three films about gender bending – two comedies and a tragedy – a personal gender landscape is created. This piece touches on the assumptions, strategies for survival and a the commitment to discussion that alternate gender expressions evoke.
Role I Was Born To Play, The
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A long process of experimentation with a variety of different filmmaking techniques while examining an evolving queer identity. The film shows an emergence of the Pink Fairy. Part femme, part tomboy, part fairy, the characters come together to subvert the idea of a fixed identity. Luminscent imagery is imprinted by hand using hand-processed colour footage, optically printing super8 to 16mm, 16mm to 16mm, negative to positive, video to film, and repeating motifs, to explore the intricacies of the celluloid medium. Audio emotes through random manipulations in a Brion Gysin-like cut-up technique.
Pink Fairy, The
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“The conceptual and minimalist aesthetic seen in this film refers to the more complex metaphysical and alchemical transformations which occur when silver is exposed to tungsten light. These currents of light, like Daniel Burren’s striped conceptual art, refer to the basic nature of representation while attempting to resist and transform traditional viewing habits or consumption. ‘Current’ is a beautiful meditation on these realities.” – Maria Insell
Current
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A look back on half my life ago, who I wanted to be. Love and longing – lost friendship, belonging, the fear of touch, a magical embrace, a spell to dispel. Hands become a moment of realization – an intense feeling like no other – you realize you love her, but can never have her.
They Dance Alone
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“A super-short Super 8 remake camps up the Coppola classic. An obsession of mine, and a lot of other girls, this movie touched my sense of belonging at a time when I felt I had none – teenagehood. Years later, when tomboy-ish has matured into gender-bending queerness, 21 grown ‘girls’ play at ‘boyhood’. Done DIY style, with an ‘unknown’ all-star cast of girls, this film embodies both a music video style of fast cuts and silent film intertitles – a post-post-modern experiment of complicity and resistance.” – Juliana Saragosa Selected screenings: London Lesbian & Gay Film Festival (London, UK), 2006; Outfest (Los Angeles, CA), 2006; Reeling (Chicago, IL), 2006; Milano Lesbian & Gay Film Festival (Milan, Italy), 2006
Outsiders, The
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Originally filmed inside Québec City’s CP train tunnel, 930 presents a series of sequences oscillating between light and darkness, intercut with moments of stillness.
930
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“In order to take the next step (not forward or backwards, but only: to go on) it is often necessary (for me) to lean on a picture made by someone else, sometimes a word will do, a gesture, the look on a stranger’s face. Colin Campbell made the next step possible for me so I took up a video camera (his pictures were my company, and my camera accompanied his pictures). Between his images of the past and mine, Colin Campbell emerged as a Cold Warrior, as an artist who would fight the Cold War with stereo. Yes, a stereo artist! Fascination contains only the pictures I would find in my camera when I reviewed the material in the morning, after all the serious work had been done (while I and all the others who spoke his language, lay sleeping).” – Mike Hoolboom A metabiopic about the Canadian pioneer of the video scene and icon of the drag scene, Colin Campbell, who died in 2001. And therefore also about the development of television, the Cold War and the shadow of a master. “‘Fascination’ offers glimpses of Campbell’s often hilarious attempts to subvert the tropes of television, casting himself as its brightest star. The lively and eagerly audacious nature of Campbell’s work makes it a strong counterpoint to Hoolboom’s weightier pronouncements on time and image in the atomic age, as well as the raw demonstrations of grief by the people Campbell left behind. ” – Jason Anderson, Eye Weekly “A documentary that is part biography of times and events that shaped the sculptor-turned-video artist, and part examination of the filmed image, the relations we leave behind, and a meditation on what creates an artist. Mike Hoolboom has created a singularly unique biographical documentary.” – Donovan Aikman, Victoria Independent Film & Video Festival Selected screenings: Ann Arbor Film Festival, 2007; International Film Festival Rotterdam, 2006; Images Festival, Toronto (opening night film), 2006; Visions du Reel, Nyon, 2006; European Media Art Festival, Osnabruck, 2006; Split International Film Festival, Croatia, 2006.
Fascination
