A painful story of a follow-up interview with a rape victim, Anita. In an effort to get to the truth, the police officer, Detective Voss, has the difficult task of asking probing questions about an event Anita would much prefer to forget. No less disturbing than the questions he asks is the truth that is finally revealed.
Filter Films
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Havana, Cuba. A man and a pig lead the way through this series of nine brief portraits of Cuban artists. A mixed-media short film composed of 16 mm, animated 35 mm stills, Super 8, interviews and sounds recorded in Havana. An image maker spends a month in Havana. There he meets a few visual artists with whom he talks about the kinds of ideas that motivate their art. Through this, the filmmaker creates metaphors of the exterior world these eight artists’ experience.
Entonces Bueno
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Dubbed “The Cheaper than the Blair Witch Project,” this sketch parody takes place in the small town of Fergus, Ontario. Local legend has it that an elementary school teacher has lost her mind and is now a scary, but gorgeous, hermit in the woods. Yet, parents have no problem sending their children to her woodsy day camp, where they are forced to eat broccoli and roast cauliflower while singing Christian campfire songs.
The Scary Bitch Project
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As we watch through a tourist’s video camera for the Old Faithful geyser to erupt, visitors stand just outside the frame and vent their own desires and frustrations on one another. The anxious videographer and his helpful wife; the dazzled mother with her cynical teenaged son; the pontifical father and his overmodulated daughter; and the couple who have just decided to separate – as the geyser finally erupts, each of them explodes in their own way. “One of Canada’s most imaginative experimental filmmakers (her other acclaimed films include Sifted Evidence, Low Visibility, Ley Lines) returns with a concise, amusing and telling examination of how we look and how we think. As the camera remains fixed in its gaze at the impending gush of the Old Faithful geyser, voices off-screen express impatience, expectation, uncertainty and awe at the power of nature unleased before them. It is a clever conceit, revealing just how restless North Americans are: we can’t wait for anything! A deceptively simple short film, Before It Blows suggest vast thematic outlines which explore human Gruben’s work, the very foundations of our tenuous knowledge of the world and of ourselves.” – Tom McSorley, Take One (Winter 1998)
Before It Blows
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Part documentary, part fiction, and highly experimental, Steve Sanguedolce’s “Smack” follows the story of three brothers (Antonio, Sybil and Zed) as they try to find their way in the world. The brothers exercise their youthful autonomy in defiant ways, exploring all that is forbidden (drugs, crime, violence). Their teenage years are filled with unhealthy, dangerous and criminal behaviour that eventually begins to pull them apart. The stories are told by actual subjects talking about their own lives, and range from religious transformations to heroin overdoses; they are funny, frightening, horrifying and all real. Toronto-based director/cinematographer Steve Sanguedolce matches these interconnected voice-over narratives with incredible hand-processed and vividly hand-toned images, creating a brightly coloured world at once beautiful and threatening. The intensity of family relationships, the lure of danger, and the hope for redemption are powerfully present in “Smack,” a fascinating, disturbing film, and Sanguedolce’s most ambitious work to date. Awards: Jury Award, Best Drama, Bargain Basement Film Festival, 2000; Audience Award, Best Drama, Bargain Basement Film Festival, 2000
Smack
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Visionary film. Experimental landscape animation: Moving time-lapse, telephoto cropping, and laborious re-registration create a surreal portrait of Western Canada. The “vision point” occurs when object and subject fuse, dissolving the distinction between the view and the viewer.
Vision Point
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This hand-painted step-printed film begins with streaks of glare light and vibrantly colored forms apparently in the sky for in as much as there appears, frame center, the tapered shape of a tower, a silhouette as it were against the backdrop of the flaring sky. As this shape of tower disappears, the conflagration of scratches and paints seems grounded and takes on the semblance of a battle of knights, their lances, horses, et al, often against a scattering of star-like flecks until finally the silhouette of the tower reappears as if much closer, certainly thicker and straight-sided. The film finishes as textures which, tend to suggest an entrance into the textured walls of the tower, textures and stars intermingled with what may well seem chain-mail as well. (Stan Brakhage)
Dark Tower, The
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A bittersweet love story about modern-day romance versus suicide. Late one night, a woman returns to the apartment she used to live in with her now ex-boyfriend. She knocks on the door and under the impression no one is home, lets herself in and begins to gather her belongings. On her way to the bathroom she passes the bedrom door and glimpses her ex-boyfriend’s naked, sleeping body. Then in the bathroom she finds an an emptied bottle of sleeping pills in the sink. She goes into the bedroom to confront him and during their dialogue they make up and fall back into each others arms. Has he taken the sleeping pills? We don’t find out until the next morning.
So Beautiful
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“Spinal Tap” meets “Bullets Over Broadway!” This hilarious comedy short about what goes on behind the scenes of a musical theatre production captures the more interesting side of theatre – a side the audience rarely have a chance to see. A cocky young assistant named Larry P. Vanderville is our guide (and seems to be the only one holding the final rehearsal). Tensions are running high. Apparently the leading man and leading lady hate each other. Did the leading lady really sleep with the producers to get her role? The Director is a critically acclaimed genius. But wait, he’s not on the verge of a nervous breakdown, is he? Is that handsome leading man really gay? And who is this assisstant, Lary P. Vanderville, anyway? Find out what really is going on when you go “Behind the Scenes.”
Behind the Scenes
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All of us have experienced times in our lives when the world seems to spin too fast and out of control. Shot in Toronto and Berlin, this film is a love story that tries to make sense of our fragile alignment in the modern world. At the airport on his way to Australia, Adam watches and worries about the check-in lady as she falls ill to some silent and mysterious nausea. Her dizziness triggers a string of memories connected to events in his life. Structured as a series of interwoven vignettes, this film traces the intercontinental wanderings of a modern global citizen as he discovers the true meaning of dizziness.
Dizzy
