“Minomen Harvest” is a documentary of the traditional native method of harvesting wild rice which takes place outside the town of Ardock in Ontario. The August harvest begins with cutting the wild rice by hand, then the drying and winowing. No mechanization is used throughout the entire process. The film ends with a sunrise ceremony that honours Mother Earth, the creator of wild rice.
Filter Films
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Life is like a gigantic phonograph record fifty feet across. Or like one of those whirling discs at the old amusement park. You get on the disc and it’s spinning and the faster it goes, the more centrifugal force builds up to throw you off it. The speed on the outer edge of the disc is so great you have to hold on for dear life just to stay on. The closer you get to the center of the disc, the slower the speed is and the easier it is to stand up. In fact, at the very center there is a point that is completely motionless. In life, most people don’t get on the disc at all. They shouldn’t get on. They don’t have the nerve. They just sit in the stands and watch. Some people like to get on the outer edge and hang on and ride like hell. Others are standing up and falling down, staggering, lurching toward the center. And a few, a very few, reach the middle, that perfect motionless point, and stand up in the dead center of the rearing whirligig as if nothing could be clearer. A Super 8 film. (CB)
Mine’s Bedlam
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Jack Stone is bright yellow and fairly cheerful about it, all things considered. He has terminal liver cancer and must spend his last month on earth in a hospital. Family, friends, and total strangers surround Jack’s bedside to engage him in meaningful conversation while Jack’s wife tries to fend off the visiting intruders. The film is a humorous and pointed examination of “conversations” in the face of death.
Art of Conversation, The
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“Across” is about the sometimes difficult journey from one psychic space to another. From a place in the abusive past, to a place called survival.” – Liz Czach, Toronto International Film Festival “Across” has a gentler power, furiously and passionately engaging with the unobtrusive landscape to uncover what most of us have yet to discover.” – Take One, Fall 1997
Across
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“Rimmer describes “Migration” as ‘organic myth,’ and he recalls that shooting began with the central image of a dead deer on a beach. Subsequently, he worked on either side of that image (shooting and editing) towards a composition that predominantly featured visual rhythms (which) are the result of an integration of two interesting techniques – flash-frame montage and ‘writing’ with the hand-held camera… Naturalism is subordinated to a kinetic interaction with organic life processes and decay.” – Al Razutis, Vancouver Art Gallery
Migration
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The severe pain inflicted during a migraine attack alters the vision of the sufferer often to the point of hallucination. The optical symptoms of this disorder open it up for expressive filmic interpretation. A jumpy and fractured roller-coaster montage is transformed into the comically tortured hallucinations of a migraine sufferer as she loses control of her vision and mental faculties.
Migraine
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“In ‘midst’, Barbara Sternberg has made a lyrical film about attachment, integration, belonging. Many of the familiar elements of Sternberg’s work are here: speed, pulsing rhythms, explosions of colour, light and shape, images of nature and the built environment. But the conflicted situations and turmoil of earlier major films like ‘Through and Through’ and ‘Beating’ are gone. Instead, ‘midst’ focuses dramatically on an understanding of the world through art, specifically painting, especially abstraction, here translated into filmic terms. Abstraction becomes the vehicle for taking on complexity, putting it all together in heightened moments of intense vision characteristic of ‘seeing into’ or ‘being at one’ with nature.” – Rae Davis
midst
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These two complex visual puzzles were shot over several months on two of Vancouver’s many bridges – the Lion’s Gate and Burrard Street Bridges. Shots taken at different times are optically printed to produce an unusual portrait of each bridge.
Mid Span and Parallel Views
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An improvised dramatization of a family counselling session with Michael, a homosexual, and his family. The session is facilitated by an actual social worker, who specializes in such counselling. Each family member is given the opportunity to explore his or her feelings about Michael being homosexual. The film concludes with Michael’s evaluation of his decision to reveal his homosexuality to his family.
Michael, A Gay Son
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“The jury felt the best experimental film would be the work which not only displayed a new way of looking through cinema but which also found something new at which to look. In this spirit the jury has awarded the prize for best experimental film to ‘Mexico’. Although its initial context is a languidly dystopic trip from Toronto to Mexico and back again, its true subject is power: the power inscribed in the unseeing gaze of the tourist, the power manifest in the recently signed North American Free Trade Agreement, under the auspices of which Mexican workers threaten to be divided up by American and Canadian corporations tired of living wages, labour unions and environmental regulations.” – Oberhausen Jury “In ‘Mexico’, first prize winner at this year’s Oberhausen Short Film Festival, we are taken to Mexico City and back to Toronto in a timeless, beautifully filmed and paced journey through the ‘New World Order’ with images of bullfights, dinosaur graveyards, aquariums, tourists climbing the Aztec Pyramids and the belching smoke of a North American factory polluting the Mexican jungle.” – Cordelia Swann, London Film Festival Catalogue, 1993 “In ‘Mexico’, experimental filmmakers Hoolboom and Steve Sanguedolce set out to dissect the travel bug. Hoolboom’s deadpan, incisive voice-over offers the viewer the air-tight experience of a Third World holiday, while images from an archaeological museum to a bullfight to an auto factory establish the dual contexts of tourism and Free Trade.” – Toronto International Festival Catalogue “This high contrast, anti-travelogue benefits from a sharply ironic image track and a mordant voice-over that lends menace to the notion of direct address. Between the film’s title and its somewhat arch ‘erasure’ the subject shifts from Mexico to its Canuck observers.” – Top Ten Films of 1992‚ Cameron Bailey, Now Magazine “‘Mexico’ ruthlessly unmasks and dissects the assumptions and half-truths we tell ourselves about development and progress. Not so much a film as a series of live-action postcards, the images are sustained by an incisive voice-over. The tour ranges from an archeological museum to a car factory (‘a factory which produces only smoke’) to a hideously graphic bullfight, linking cultural colonialism to free trade. ‘Everything you touch turns into Toronto‚’Hoolboom says, and this vacation jaunt ends with the disquieting transformation of the Mexico City streets into the 401.” – Josh Ramish, Variety “When you travel through an unknown country with the aim of forgetting about where you come from, you’re bound to see the new places as willing reproductions of what you are trying to leave behind. Thus the lonely traveller in Mexico, escaping his hometown of Toronto, cannot but project the fundamental questions about life, death and history that trouble his mind upon this new environment solely within the context of his own background. What was supposed to become a touristic relief or the beginning of a new life turns into a lucid and sensitive analysis full of unfamiliar images, a compelling journey into his own state of mind.” – Miryam van Lier, Visions du Reel catalogue Awards: Best Experimental Film, Oberhausen Film Festival, 1993; Best Poetic Documentary, Athens Film Festival, 1993, Honorable Mention, Atlanta Film and Video Festival, 1994; Certificate of Merit, Cork Film Festival, 1993
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