“Divas: Love Me Forever” is a comic-serious documentary about female impersonation, desire, fantasy, self-acceptance and the search for love. Edimburgo Cabrera, the Cuban-Canadian director and videographer (Latin Queens), follows six black female impersonators through Toronto’s vibrant gay club scene as they search for home, family, and love. The life stories of these six divas become a prism illuminating gay life in the Caribbean and North America from the 1970s to the present. A diva is a female impersonator who stands out amongst her peers because of her superior performance talents, devoted public following, and public advocacy on behalf of her gay community. The divas in the documentary are Michelle Ross, Chris Edwards, Jackae Baker, Stephanie Stevens, Matti Dinah and Duchess (deceased).
Filter Films
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The film is constructed upon a short loop, extracted from an old 8mm burlesque film depicting a belly dancer moving against a black background. Her dance consists of little more than a series of languid, circular gestures. Her hips, elbows, wrists and stomach perpetuate endless circles each within their own orbits of motion. The image is black and white, scratched and grainy, and further complicated by the orange bubbles of nitrate decay that speckle the emulsion’s surface. The loop is expanded across the film’s duration through repetition and multiple superimpositions. The film is an exercise in the plastic properties of those devices available to film: light, speed and duration.
Cinema and Visual Pleasure
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This film is part of an ongoing series of 16mm films simply called “Japan.” “Kesei Line Single Take” is a visual poem; its imagery (of passing Japanese landscape) is at times like that of Abstract Expressionist painting. This entire film is comprised of one take- there are no cuts, no camera moves, no exposure, focus, or shutter adjustments. “Absolutely captivating.” – Tor Lukasik-Foss, Art Gallery of Hamilton
Japan: Kesei Line Single Take
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Recounting the painful memory of a mother with a problem and a brother’s means of coping.
Thin Bleeding Walls
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“Partisan” is a dialogue-free stop-motion animation that explores the problems inherent in a partisan political system via a cast of characters created out of small scale found objects. A look at the challenges of having one’s voice heard from outside a political party, as well as the muzzling of the individual which takes place from within one.
Partisan
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“Begin” uses hand-processing and collaged sound as an overture to life. The first in Saul’s “Toxic” film series, this chapter explores the way birth and death, life and decay interweave.
Begin (Toxic 1)
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“The Travelling Eye of the Blue Cat” is a 16-minute, 35mm photo-collage animation . Using a surreal fairytale style, the film combines music and animation to tell the story of a girl awoken one morning by a mysterious seagull, which crashes against her bedroom window. Following the bird into an abandoned garden, the girl discovers the edge of the world. Perched on this edge is a single tree bearing a tangy red fruit, guarded by raucous birds. When the girl scares off the birds, and takes a bite of the fruit, she catapults herself into a startling, violent and extended metamorphosis orchestrated by the birds themselves. Funded by the Jerome Foundation and The New York Foundation for the Arts.
Travelling Eye of the Blue Cat, The
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Here’s a peek at some early cinematic works by Patrick McGuinn. These ten award-winning short films use a blend of folkloric icons and modern dilemmas to tell their humorous, fresh and unique stories. See the oddities, mysticisms and boldness that would typify later works like “Desert Spirits” and “Suroh: Alien Hitchhiker,” films which have stuck chords in the hearts of millions.
Puppets & Demons
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This film documents the large scale clear-cutting on public lands on Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia and areas that are still uncut that are in urgent need of wilderness preservation.
Cape Breton Endangered Spaces, The
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This film rises out of my struggle to photograph the ephemeral qualities of varied air (as many Greek philosophers experienced such) and to arrange the resultant textures/tones of film (in sharp conjunction with images hard-edged as words can be) so that it be true as breath itself to the necessities of music.
Airs
