A satiric parable on non-conformity and the rat race. Meeting self-imposed challenges that begin with undressing and dressing in the time it takes for his elevator to descend nine floors, a man develops increasingly complex tasks to perform in the same period. His comical secret life transforms his existence from banality to oblivion. The film makes extensive use of pixillation techniques.
Filter Films
-
This is a comedy about a boy who sweeps floors in a Chi-Com drug store and who one day meets a girl. What happens after that is humorously absurd.
Arnold
-
“Voyeurism, eroticism, violence and pornography are challengingly jumbled together: the result is a mixture of fluttery pictures which cloud what is real and what is not, making the questions that these films provoke all the more disturbing.” – Jane Headon, City Limits “‘Mercy’ shows no mercy as it dissects the games mass media play with our perceptions. It blends found footage, images and sounds into a flow that’s as revealing as it is overwhelming.” – New York Festival Catalogue
Mercy
-
A wry comedy on the disagreeable aspects of menstruation. Women act out their own dramas on a California hillside, in a supermarket, in a red-filtered ritual of mutual bonding. “Menses” combines both the imagery and the politics of menstruation in a fine blend of comedy and drama.
Menses
-
Memento’s chameleon narrative timeshifts between the nostalgic nightmares of Rebecca (Marg Hitcick), John’s (Mark Ruzylo) invasive investigations, and Richard’s (Scott Withers) idiosyncratic meditations about John and his film. Rebecca, troubled by an uncertain past and her obsessive filmmaking father, holds a yard sale to rid herself of his memory forever. John, a disgruntled filmmaker who works in a run-down film processing lab, tries to make his first feature by cutting together old footage he finds at yard sales. When he finds some disturbing reels in Rebecca’s garbage, he questions her and has the door slammed in his face.
Memento
-
The women of the Shum family are a force to be reckoned with. Sitting around joking about how they pull the wool over Dad’s eyes, or remembering all the absurdities of growing up Chinese in Vancouver, it’s clear they’ve hit on a strategy that can handle both Chinese tradition and Canadian custom – humour. The laughter resonates throughout “Me, Mom and Mona” to touch off much deeper responses.
Me, Mom and Mona
-
In “McLuhan”, Kerr recontextualizes a “question and answer period” for design students delivered by media theorist Marshall McLuhan at Sherdian College in 1975. Operating from McLuhan’s own aphorism “the medium is the message,” Kerr combines footage of the address with two scrolling texts in the borders, in one showing an asynchronous transcript that weaves around McLuhan’s dialogue, and in another, reinforcing McLuhan’s talking points like a ticker on cable news. It has the effect of sharply reconceptualizing the semantic and rhetorical values of the lecture in particular, yet also provides a fascinating perspective on McLuhan’s own ideas and intellectual form of address.
McLuhan
-
“Mayhem” gives homage to Film Noir, soap opera thrillers and Mexican comic books, which generate the action. Perversely and equally inspired by de Sade’s “Justine” and Vertov’s sentences about the satiric detective advertisement, “Mayhem” looks at sexuality and violence in the movies. “Mayhem” links the screen, the bedroom, and the streets to generate a mosaic of the way modern culture sends mixed signals about sexuality to men and women. “‘Mayhem’ is more than a detective story; it’s a hypermodern melding of forms, an erotic send-up of slapstick with a heady dose of cultural nay-saying.” – Elizabeth Pincus, Gay Community News “The shots are fast and flickering, the soundtrack equally fragmented, yet for such a diverse blend of ideas the significance of each image is striking. Voyeurism, eroticism, violence and pornography are challengingly jumbled together; the result is a mixture of fluttery pictures which cloud what is real and what is not, making the questions that these films provoke all the more disturbing.” – Jane Headon, City Limits, London “‘Mayhem’ reminds us that our bodies belong as much to the history of cinema as they do to our lovers.” – Tom Kalin, The Independent
Mayhem
-
“A Matter of Expectations” depicts the life circumstances of women living in the Runnymede Hospital, a chronic care facility in Toronto. Longer life spans, low incomes, and a lack of housing alternatives force many women to be dependent on the health care system. This film surveys the problems confronting older women through interviews in which women discuss their feelings about aging, institutional life, the care they receive, and dying. Footage of life in the hospital with accompanying voice-overs presents a balanced view of the problematic position of older women in the 1980s.
Matter of Expectations, A
