A docu-drama on the sterility of suburban high school life and an example of one young man’s attempt to escape. From a brief intense excursion into drugs, music and parties, to a rational attempt at change through participation in a school paper, “The Brick,” Michael’s alienation is symbolized in a recurring nightmare of frustration and anger where he hurls a brick into a black void. Eventually he comes to terms with his loneliness and blindness through photography, and accepts his entry into the adult world.
Filter Films
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A young woman has to pee. Due to various circumstances and her own inability to admit it, she holds it in. When the need becomes too unbearable, she takes matters into her own hands – with unexpected results.
Urge
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“Powerful and raw, CRACK, BRUTAL GRIEF is an impressive extension of R. Bruce Elder’s obsessions with history, media culture, psychology, technology, and the cruelty found in nature. The film acts as a primal scream, literally and metaphorically. The point of departure for the film came shortly after the gruesome suicide of Elder’s close friend. Elder began an investigative examination of graphic images of suicides, scenes of horror, and hard-core pornography found on the internet, which ultimately form the thesis of this cathartic expression of grief. ‘Increasingly angered by the Web’s banalization of suffering, I decided to fashion a compilation film, using only material from the Web that would return to the degraded images I found there the full dignity of their horror’ (Elder). “Assisted by a talented team of young Toronto filmmakers – Ilana Gutman, Izabella Pruska-Oldenhof, Maria Raponi, Jeremy Elder-Jubelin, and Greg Boa – Elder constructs a sophisticated montage of highly-processed imagery which transforms these images of horror into a weave of abstraction. The film’s inspired sound collage draws upon an expansive range of pop culture and avant-garde sources. Like Elder’s ‘The Book of All The Dead,’ ‘Crack, Brutal, Grief’ uses a series of dialectical concepts in opposition to probe a range of philosophical concerns related to the history of consciousness in the twentieth century.” – Cinematheque Ontario “Canadian filmmaker R. Bruce Elder has dazzled audiences for almost 30 years with his experimental films, and his latest project, ‘Crack, Brutal Grief,’ continues his reputation for getting to the core of who we are as a culture. The 130-minute film is composed entirely of images pulled off the Internet, and the surfeit of footage mixing porn and brutality is nothing short of shocking. Elder treats the images, though, augmenting their textures and swirling their colors, often making them into abstract, stylized imagescapes that are quite beautiful. ‘I was thinking about the plasticity of the image and how it was malleable,’ says Elder. He also asserts that he’s interested in ‘a cinema of the tactile rather than a cinema of the visual,’ a claim that holds up, thanks to the film’s thickly textured images. “‘Crack, Brutal Grief’ began when a friend killed himself with a chainsaw and Elder wanted a way to deal with his grief and horror. He immersed himself in the Web-based images, worked with them for hours at a time, studiously manipulating single frames in a process of grappling with the violence done to the human body. ‘Crack, Brutal Grief’ is not a gentle, pleasant digital film; instead it’s an assault that somehow manages to give meaning back to images that have been emptied out. “ – Holly Willis, Resalert
Crack, Brutal Grief
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Inept techies at a second-rate television station allow the audio track to slip back, becoming misaligned with the video of an Italian soap-film that’s trying to capture the essence of old black-and-white movies, with a few mistakes.
Foreign Film, The
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This film is about a personal shamanic journey. This is also a haunting visual poem. Two souls in one world, one breath, one life, one realm. The underwater realm becomes the environment where this merging of souls takes place. The dance emulates the movement of water. Dancer Penny Couchie moves like the ocean. She becomes the ocean and the life within it. According to the Haida legend, the undersea realm is where human souls resort after death. Using this statement as a concept, exploration of the human soul is investigated. We will be bridged together, into one living being, yet moving as individuals, sharing the same space. This film is meant to explore worlds we cannot experience in captivity. Worlds that are created from nature itself. Each viewer will experience a different journey.
Sea of Souls
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This film is about the depressive experience and explores visually the mental languages experienced by those who suffer from clinical depression. The film sets out to relate to any person how the experience feels and to what intensity. It is an educational film, an experimental film, and an artistic expression to the world. The silence of suffering is apparent to those who understand the depressed mind. The film embraces the brain and how the two (brain and depression) are a dual mystery to the human condition. For those who sufer, they will feel welcome and embraced, to those who do not, they will better understand how the depressed feels. This is a vital step to helping us understand its foreign existence.
Neurofeedback
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As a follow-up to the award-winning “Zyklon Portrait,” “The Walnut Tree” offers a striking combination of documentary and experimental approaches to examine Holocaust memory, the family, and the role of photography in history. Three girls in Dutch costumes stand posing for their father. This fleeting moment, made static in a photograph, is contrasted with the moving imagery of railway tracks – tracks that carried the death transports – now blurred with memory and time. In a matter-of-fact tone, Schogt’s mother describes how her parents tore several pictures out of the family albums when they fled the Nazis in 1943. The albums were kept safe in a warehouse in Amsterdam. Schogt’s mother recounts how the walnut tree her parents planted was cut down during the war. After the war, her sister finds the tree with several new shoots – now a huge tree that bears quantities and quantities of delicious fresh walnuts every year. “In a mere 11 minutes, ‘The Walnut Tree’ provides considerable amount of food for thought. It should be good for generating class discussion about family photos and memories, as well as about the Holocaust. Recommended.” – Barb Bergman, Educational Media Reviews Online Selected screenings: Toronto International Film Festival; Margaret Mead Film Festival; WYBE-TV Through the Lens Series
Walnut Tree, The
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Jodie moves into a new house, only to discover her housemates are perpetually nude, or are they? A few incidents occur which could have a plethora of different meanings: narcotic illusion, dream, prank or inexplicable paradox.
Nude Not
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On one level the film simply records the process of bricklaying and thus it conjoins both sides of Winkler’s life – his artisanal work as a bricklayer and his artistic pursuit as a filmmaker. On another level, however, the film is a highly abstract work that transforms the structure of a brick wall into a virtual canvas.
Brick Wall
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Francisco, the lead character, is a Portuguese-Canadian artist who has just been commissioned to work on a painting celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Portuguese revolution, which took place on April 25, 1974. His agent, upon realizing how distanced Francisco feels from his home, sends him to Portugal to rediscover it. Once there, he goes to meet Catarina, a childhood friend who lives with her family in a small village. Conflict arises when Catarina’s father discovers that Francisco has returned. An ex-captain of the notorious PIDE, the Portuguese equivalent to the KGB, he had Francisco’s father imprisoned, tortured, and killed as a direct reaction to the revolution. Catarina and her mother give Francisco a warm welcome, in spite of her father, who they have come to despise. After discovering a dark secret related to what her father does, Catarina and Francisco flee from the village with her mother. Catarina’s father finally catches up with the two characters in Lisbon where Francisco is beaten and left to die. The last thing he sees as he dies in a pool of his own blood is the 25th anniversary parade marching by. Catarina, who has escaped the wrath of her father, wanders aimlessly into the same crowd, lost.
Lost Heroes
