Available for purchase in the CFMDC Shop: https://www.cfmdc.org/shop. 1) 4x8x3 by Chris Kennedy (2004 / Regular 8 / 3 min.) 8mm unsplit. Streetcars circle. The ferry leaves and returns in one gesture. Camera and character dance. 2) All U Can Eat by Stevi Urben (2003 / Super 8 / 12 min.) Increasingly separated from his place of birth, a 70-year-old Jewish native of Quebec fuses personal and historical memory to create a sense of belonging. 3) Coolie Gyal by Renata Mohamed (2004 / Super 8 / 5.5 min.) In this coming-out story, an honest and sincere letter is read from a daughter to her parents. 4) Evanesce by Jamie Phelan (2003 / Super 8 / 5.5 min.) Phelan confronts the possibility of losing his sight and tries to make sense of the memories trapped in pictures that are disappearing before his very eyes. 5) Made in Japan by Midi Onodera (1985 / Super 8 / 2.5 min.) North American portrayals of Japan perpetuate the myths of Americanized culture, distorting and misrepresenting traditional values. 6) October 25th + 26th, 1996 by Kika Thorne (1996 / Super 8 / 8 min.) To protest the erosion of the city, the October Group inflates a 150’ long building using the air vents in front of Toronto’s Nathan Phillips Square. 7) Parade by Juliana Saragosa (2001 / Super 8 / 6.5 min.) A hand-made film that explores a 21st-century ritual celebration: Toronto’s Gay Pride Parade (2000). 8) Reading Canada Backwards by Steven Topping (1995 / Super 8 / 12 min.) A travel log of a technical object keeping time on a big train. 4000 miles from Vancouver to Halifax with three frames of film shot for every mile. 9) Firefly by John Porter (1980 / Super 8 / 3.5 min.) A performance with projector creates a dance of light.
Filter Films
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“Revisiting footage he shot more than ten years ago in an American high school, Vincent Grenier combines deftly manipulated and layered images with oblique commentaries delivered by students and instructors. The socializing process of education is made visible in the architecture, surfaces and colours of the school, ‘in the ambiguous quality of appearances so assiduously cultivated by institutions’ (Grenier).” – Images Festival, 2005 Initial footage shot with the helpof a production grant from the Canada Council. Selected screenings & awards: Jury’s Citation (2nd Prize), Black Maria Film & Video Festival; 2nd Prize, Media City 11, Windsor, Ontario; Views from the Avant-Garde, New York Film Festival, 2004; Onion City Experimental Film & Video Festival, Chicago, 2004; Images Festival, Toronto, 2005; San Francisco International FIlm Festival; Athens International Film & Video Festival, Ohio
Tabula Rasa
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Just as Lolo, a gay Italian-Secondo, is getting ready to spend a romantic evening with his lover, his Italian Nonna makes an unexpected appearance. Un homosexuel d’origine italienne, Lolo, s’apprête à passer la soirée avec son amant. Or, voice que Mémé passe à l’improviste et met Lolo dans une situation épineuse.
Fidanzata, La
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A late summer prairie storm as heard from above… someplace between this atmosphere and the next…
migration
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Traveling through an invented landscape… the space between here and there. “Battle grounds her travel films not so much in place as in time. ‘the distance between here and there’ is one of her most abstract, rigorous and beautiful engagements with duration… In Battle’s film, it is between here and there, the interval between two points, that marks the experience of travel. The film is able to powerfully evoke that indefinite liminal nowhere, the feeling of being dislocated and in movement.” – Janine Marchessault “An abstract film made by applying colour tape directly onto emulsion and exposing it to light. The film presents colour fields in motion, though for the most part the ground is white like a gessoed canvas, and filled with a moving curtain of dust and hair and spots. In order to relieve the regularity (the tyranny?) of the projector’s 24 frame per second pulse, freeze frames are introduced, showing up and isolating a jagged crimson edge, an orange wall with its soft cracks, a yellow corner. After isolating, and setting apart colours in the film’s opening movement, they are brought together in a careening, flickering collage in the film’s second minute. Anticipating and then re-blending the afterimages of these ragged colour fields, the palette slowly darkens as the layers accumulate, canceling out the brilliance of ‘pure’ colours. A visceral, physical cinema making the eyeballs sweat. Hidden colour codes of the synapses firing: a new thought is being born, and a new movie to accompany it.” – Mike Hoolboom, 2007
distance between here and there, the
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“The picture of the world that’s presented to the public has only the remotest relation to reality…” – Noam Chomsky “In a colour fest of broken emulsions, the artist reconvenes a suite of feel good 50s adverts for a better life. A young boy on a bicycle, a blonde smiler on a tricycle, two men at a clothesline, the crisp border of neighborhood lawns appearing as if no one had ever set foot on them. The world is blank and the first line I lay across it is perfect, and then the second marks an intersection and the town is born. Everything recognizable as a picture arrives via drawings, stills, which are gathered here in a restless, teeming movement. Animation but not Saturday morning cartoons. “Mom waves good-bye to her two darlings at the front door. They have never had a problem because those words haven’t been invented yet. No shadows, no sense that there was ever a moment that wasn’t this moment. Whose nostalgia does this white world belong to? Whose idea of perfect is this? In the hands of the artist each frame has been stressed and fractured and re-presented with all of the fault lines clearly on display. Cohen liked to sing to us, ‘There is a crack in everything. That’s where the light comes in.’ The drunken band plays on, the strings staggered and staggering. Who will tell them to stop?” – Mike Hoolboom, 2007 Selected Screenings: International Film Festival Rotterdam, 2007; Festival du Nouveau Cinéma, Montreal, QC, 2006
nostalgia (april 2001 to present)
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The Friends of Hickory Hill Park work to protect nearly 200 acres of unique urban parkland in Iowa City, IA. The organization’s mission statement must be produced, the inaugural calendar approaches. Nature images run parallel, collide and drift beside the demands of group writing and open space. “A film at once playful and thoughtful, visually deep and linguistically complex (and funny!). ‘Under Foot & Overstory’ weaves together a commmitment to activism with a love of looking at the natural world. The Friends of Hickory Hill Park, an Iowa City-based environmental group, work to protect a unique urban space and to define that land, its terms, and sometimes themselves.” – Iowa City International Documentary Festival Selected screenings & awards: Best of Iowa, Iowa City International Documentary Festival, 2005; Director’s Citation, Black Maria Film & Video Festival; Ann Arbor Film Festival, 2005; New York Underground Film Festival, 2005; Portland Documentary and Experimental Film Festival, 2005; Athens Internation Film & Video Festival, Athens, OH, 2005
Underfoot & Overstory
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Ahmed’s tranquil life in Montreal goes into a tailspin when his meddling mother visits from Cairo with a single purpose in mind… Selected screenings: Out Takes Gay & Lesbian Film Festival, New Zealand, 2005; Toronto Worldwide Short Film Festival, 2005; Hamburg Lesbian & Gay Film & Video Festival, 2005, Pink Apple Gay & Lesbian Film Festival, Switzerland, 2005 Audience Award at the 2005 Fresno Gay & Lesbian Film Festival. Audience Award at the 2005 Montreal Lesbian & Gay Film Festival
Cairo Calling
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“Every Other Day of the Week” wonders, plays with and ponders the where of dykedom today.
Every Other Day of the Week
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Using found footage, this portrait of self falls in from somewhere over the moon, turns childhood around, pushes through with tunes of a time, and lands in wild fields of plenty.
Flying without Wings, Propellers or Jets
