An incredibly angry and political film about the state of the world.
Filter Films
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If you love something, set it free. If it comes back to you, you’re going to get what you deserve. Based on a time in the director’s past and his pet fish, this short piece looks at the point in his life when having the beautiful boyfriend just wasn’t enough.
Bye
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Life is hard when you live on Gerrard … especially when you’re a white French-Canadian rapper trying to make it on the streets of Toronto. “Busk” is a fish-out-of-water comedy about a guy with a dream who doesn’t give up even when his whole ‘hood is against him. “Busk” is based on a skit performed by the comedy troupe Sweet Potato. Eric Marier acted out his nerdy white rapper character for filmmaker Paula Tiberius over wine one evening, and she wrote the script the next day. Eric added his own raps, and they geard up to shoot the film four weeks later. Singer Andrea Morrison was so inspired by the film’s “follow your dream” theme, that she wrote a song for the film called “Time and Place” on her way home from her audition. She sang it over the phone to the filmmakers later in the evening and got the part. English and French language.
Busk
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Made for the filmmaker’s uncle, a painter and a gay man who died violently in 2001, this silent, hand-processed film marks an enduring presence with bold brush strokes. When the body is absent the shadows remain. “Still Here” consists of a series of spontaneous, single-take performances that have been edited in-camera. It is at once a eulogy and an act of defiance against the crime that ended Davis Buller’s life.
Still Here
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“Passing Through” is haunted by a song about love and marriage that can’t be fully recalled – or completely forgotten. In this beautifully hand-processed film nothing seems to fit properly. The streets of a small, Ontario town become associative paths for memory when desire stretches the seams of expectation.
Passing Through
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“TV Stories” chronicles the simple story of a man who lives alone and spends most of his time interacting with other people’s answering machines. The story is told using a structural film technique in which the room was shot from eight camera angles. The film was then edited so that each shot lasts exactly two seconds. We see the shots in the same repeated sequence, giving us a 360 degree view of the room every 16 seconds.
TV Stories
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Consumed by toaster experiments and the lure of the switching yard, a pale mad scientist (Julian Doucet) dresses up like a slightly automated Hugo Ball to enter the late winter landscape and bear witness to man’s inhumanity to machines.
Machine Machine Machine Machine
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An affectionate and eclectic view of the relationship between the camera-eye and the Toronto bus station. Who are these people who move like shadows on a wall; move in, move out, pass through or wait around; sometimes all day, sometimes all winter? How does the camera see; how do we look at things or listen to things when silver and glass and electricity guide our vision and filter our hearing? This film is a poem dedicated to the camera and more importantly to the different Bus Station People you can see any day or any minute.
Bus Station Film
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In Mandarin. Shot against the landscape of social and economic changes in Beijing – the destruction of aged houses and the construction of new pillars of skyscrapers – the film collects a string of small events which show human behaviour and its interaction with the surrounding environment that is diffused with an irritating air of crawling anxiety and sexuality. While the events are mostly unrealistic and often unrelated, at the centre of theme is a middle-class couple who are going through an uncomfortable relationship. They wonder if the quality of their relationship is due to the mal-positioning of their bed, or the uncooperative bed itself. After discussing with his wife the failed love-making of the night before and the long time disorder of her period, Lee Haun, the husband and former obstetrician, wanders into different scenes aimlessly. At the same time, Lin Chian, the wife, full of uncomfortable energy and suppressed anxiety, attempts to understand herself by standing high up on a construction scaffolding, where the value of her existence is recognized by the peering eyes of two old men. Drawn by its powerful and possessing rumbling, Lin Chian catches up with a bulldozer and rushes to an orgiastic excitement followed by an unbearable hollowness of her body. Responding to a desperate call from an abandoned broken telephone, the couple team up and take off in a military jeep, rushing to rescue a lying-in woman and her unborn baby. Eyes blindfolded as required by law, the couple steer their jeep into a highway to meet an unborn life, who is waiting and eager to join humanity.
Air Cuts, The
