“A Brighter Moon” is the story of Mikey and Valentine, two students from Hong Kong who have come to Toronto to study English at a “visa school.” Mikey and Valentine find themselves in a strange land where they must struggle to survive in a world without parents. The film attempts to show the foreign students in a sympathetic light, pointing to some of the problems they face in Canada. The title refers to an Asian proverb that translated roughly means, “The moon shines brighter in a foreign country.” “A Brighter Moon” was filmed entirely in Toronto’s Dundas Street Chinatown and presents its characters as real people without falling into the usual stereotypes of Asians seen in the West.
Filter Films
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The Living Theatre production of Kenneth Brown’s play ‘The Brig’, filmed on the stage of The Living Theatre and with the original cast. “‘The Brig’ is a raw slice of new American cinema filmed on an off-broadway stage by Jonas and Adolfas Mekas with such brutish authenticity that it won a Venice Film Festival grand prize as best documentary. Part drama, part polemic, with shock-wave sound and a nightmare air that suggests Kafka with a Kodak, the movie does exactly what it sets out to do – seizes an audience by the shirt-front and slams it around from wall to wall for one grueling day in a Marine Corps lock-up.” – Time Magazine
Brig, The
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“Movies arise out of magic.” – Stanley Cavell “Light Magic” utilizes and examines one of the earliest photographic processes, discovered at the birth of the photographic medium: the photogram. This technique combines science and art in order to record the process of transformation. Images created through this technique are traces of light that pass through each object, leaving their mark on the film surface. Photograms bring both the maker and the viewer closer to the object, thus revealing its essence – that neither the naked eye nor the camera lens could see. “Light Magic” was one of the fifteen films commissioned by the Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto on the occasion of its 20th anniversary. The subject and the aesthetic of this film are a response to the statement “Self & Celluloid: The Future.”
Light Magic
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“leda & the swan” is an intimate and sensual rendering of the impulses which shape our search for meaning. A filmmaker asks two actors to dramatize a personal story about the end of a traumatic love affair, and quickly finds herself deeply immersed not only in the actors’ complex interpretation of her story, but also in the emotional world of their own evolving relationship. Through the intermingling of the ancient myth of Leda and the Swan, the filmmaker’s personal story, and the intricate dynamics of the young actors, the deeper, poetic and archetypal aspects of all love stories – of all stories – begin to converge.
leda & the swan
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In part, a thank you to his mother, and in part a musing over how he became so “arty.” Filmmaker Roy Mitchell looks at his mother, her life, and the inspiration she gave him.
Mothercraft
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A romp across the filmmaker’s dance floor of life. A personal reflection on film, dance and living queer.
My Life in Dance
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In 1999 the newspapers in Kerala South India broke a shocking tale of two young lesbian girls who ended their lives beneath a train. A note they carried stated that they were ending their lives because they had failed in their long struggle to live together in the harsh and hypocritical society of Kerela. It is an irony that Kerela is 100 per cent literate and one of the most literate places in the world. This film picks up on the agony of those innocent girls and many others who still struggle for their emotional rights.
Petals
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“Tracing Soul” is a poetic bodyscape where the sacred, sensual, primordial and profane female form imagines and evokes the possibilities of the soul through the coalescing of the fragments, intimate gestures, oblique angles, disintegrating lines and shadows, music and text enveloping the bodily compositions. Also available on the DVD compilation “Artist Spotlight Series: Michelle Mohabeer.”
Tracing Soul
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“A Brief Life” is a poetic homage to a farmer and the cows he raises. Shot over the course of a year on a small farm in rural Ontario, it follows the same cow through the cycle of the seasons from hours after its birth right on through until it is sold for meat. It is a film concerned with documenting an entire process from beginning to end and allowing the viewer to watch it unfold. “A Brief Life” is not an anti-meat film. It comes out of the concern that by living in an urban environment we can become cut off from the process of where our food comes from. Meat neatly packaged and bought in a local supermarket bears little resemblance to, or connection with, the animal that it came from. This denial of the process seems more perverse than the process itself. By re-connecting the viewer with the process, it allows him/her to acknowledge each person who is part of that process and pay tribute to the animal that is killed. Filmed on a small farm and abattoir, it shows a lifestyle that is still very much in touch with nature and living off the land for substance. Both the farmer and the abattoir owner see the animal’s death as a natural part of life which is directly linked to their survival and livelihood. Shot in black and white, the film has the feel of a period piece which carefully documents something historical. Ironically, with the existence of small farms and businesses being threatened by the takeover of colossal companies, the film captures a rapidly fading lifestyle.
Brief Life, A
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“Ditty Dot Comma” is the first motion picture musical salute to visual punctuation. Set to the cool jazz styling of drummers Buddy Rich and Gene Krupa, and including the pulsating piano rhythms of Oscar Peterson, we make this musical leap into this abstract animated film. Using animated shapes, drawn directly onto the film’s emulsion, Woloshen opens the door into the abstract world, and propels the audience into a pure widescreen experience. Liberated from plotlines, language and recognizable forms, a universal film experience emerges, suitable for all ages and nationalities.
Ditty Dot Comma
