A styling babe finds out that sometimes what you touch can really take you there.
Filter Films
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“Tammy Ballaban wants to leave her mark, to be remembered, to stay safe. So she stops eating. ‘Thirst’ is an unconventional and beautifully structured meditation about eating disorders, hunger and desire, our need for identity, and control. A sumptuous collage of image and sound reflects the amorphous dialectic between conscious and unconscious drives.” – Lynne Fernie Selected screenings: Documentary Channel (Ontario), broadcast, 2006; Toronto Worldwide Short Film Festival, 2002; Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival, Toronto, 2002; Taiwan International Documentary Film Festival, 2002.
Thirst
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When her relatives in India finally gets a phone, a young woman contemplates how this “new” technology will narrow or widen the gap between her lesbian diasporic self and her relatives overseas. Does easy access guarantee closeness?
Phone Comes to Jammu, A
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“Dust” is an interpretation of choreographic work of Julia Sasso. The film portrays the intimate physical relationship of two dancers. The interpretive shooting style of the film unveils the emotional drama between the subjects.
Dust
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“Babies on the Sun” offers nostalgic, weathered images of “childhood” inspired by the song of the same name by the band Sparklehorse. The textured and layered style of the film gives the impression of blurred memories floating in the subconscious mind. The images, half visible, are abstracted through a process of visual degradation, suggesting the effect of time on memory, and mystified through collage, revealing the non-linear configurations of memory where images dwell in interesting and emotionally cumulative juxtapositions.
Babies on the Sun
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“Subrosa” traces a young woman’s journey to Korea, the land of her birth, to find the mother she’s never known. This exquisitely crafted drama probes the idealized, often false constructions of cultural and maternal identities wrought by the adoptee’s return. “Subrosa” tracks the unnamed heroine from a sterile adoption agency office to seedy bars and motel rooms on neon strips, then to a stark U.S. army camp town and the bustling flower markets of Seoul. Though her path to self-destruction and ultimate self-revelation ironically and tragically mirrors that of her imagined biological mother, the past remains elusive to her, the secret intact. Originally shot on digital video, the film captures the grit and garishness of an alien urban landscape while plumbing the melancholy dream space where the character retreats even as she searches for her very life. Brimming with surreal, breathtaking, elegiac imagery, this sensuously rendered tale of loss, love and longing resonates long after its shocking conclusion. Selected screenings: Toronto International Film Festival; Feminale Women’s Film Festival, Cologne, Germany; WYBE-TV Through the Lens Series
Subrosa
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“An inspired and resonant portrait of tenuous teen sensuality emerging from seamless suburban facades.” – David McIntosh, Toronto Festival of Festivals “‘My Niagara’ is definitely set in Toronto for people who know Toronto. But I wanted it to be read both ways, the character to be either Japanese Canadian or Japanese American. It’s also a matter of political self-definition, of what it means to be Asian American or Asian Canadian… It’s a matte of dissolving boundaries, about collapsing categories, as much as about self definition.” – Helen Lee, Fuse Magazine, Fall 1993
My Niagara
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Globuloids are hurtled through cosmic forces which ultimately transform them into something more human-like.
Squelching of Nowlessness
