This documentary is about the theatrical troup House of Pride, which consists of three main performers whose unique style combines both theatre and club cultures. House of Pride’s work transcends the usual boundaries of nightclub entertainment and performance art, bringing a new design of performance to theatrical spaces. The content of the performance smoothly blends together universal issues of gender and sexuality, individualism, spirituality, and the environment in a live theatrical show. House of Pride is a Montreal collective which combines outrageously athletic club-vogue-influenced choreography with searing confessional monologues.
Filter Films
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This film takes the viewer into the depths of the film noir world with black-and-white shadowy images. The film, however, is distinctly modern, unsettling and mysterious. Eric is a secret agent whose double identity and dangerous missions are completely hidden from the people closest to him. As his lies and betrayal come to the forefront due to reckless behaviour, his relationships crumble and his secret life becomes all-consuming.
Spent
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Two best friends in their early twenties gaze into each other’s eyes and recollect their sexcapades with a stupefying succession of boyfriends. The only true love here is their mutual adoration.
First Comes Love
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A chance meeting between the supercool, worldly wise Belly and the awkward, heart-broken Femur becomes an afternoon roam around the city. Their day culminates into what would seem to be a simple gesture to most but proves pivotal for these two. Written and directed by Laura Cowell, who plays both roles. An homage to the “Parent Trap”? Or taking the notion of random crushes to a more complicated level?
Belly, Femur. Femur, Belly
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A man facing his approaching death takes what is perhaps his last journey and ends up in “Pensao Globo” in Lisbon, where he sets out on aimless excursions throughout the city. With oversaturated colours, both sanguine and succulent, vision swims and slips away in echoing superimpositions. These overlapping exposures convey a sense of the permeable boundaries between life and death.
Pensão Globo
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A mother and her look-alike young daughter have died and are wandering their home-town looking for a way to come back to life. A young man who doesn’t realize they are dead agrees to show them around town. As the tour progresses, he remembers and notices progressively strange things about them, and becomes caught between his desire to help and his fear. Little does he know, they face a time limit, as do we all. This is a creepy yet beautiful tale of regeneration and rebirth.
Mother Daughter Love
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“Bodies of water” is a poetic memory of the filmmaker’s return to the Ganges River in India where her grandparents were cremated. It was only with her generation that daughters were included on the family tree. Was she now relevant? Impressionistic, meditative images of water are superimposed with slide guitar and tablas.
bodies of water
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What do you do when you wake up one morning and find your leather jacket doesn’t quite fit anymore and your spiky green hair has gone grey? Get your band back together of course. “The Ballad of Don Quinn” tells the story of southern Saskatchewan’s original punk rocker and his attempts to resurrect his band a decade after their scarcely noticed demise. Years ahead of the Sex Pistols and Hard Core Logo. “One of the top ten Canadian short films of the 1990s.” – Cinémascope magazine “A landmark film.” – Brian Stockton: The Best of Western Canadian Comedy
Ballad of Don Quinn, The
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A meneral memory movie, “Blue Venice / Red Hotel” consists of seven loops of B&W film projected at various speeds and re-filmed off the wall; magnified, superimposed, filtered red and blue. The loops were built from “The Red Hotel,” an earlier film and one which was shot at high velocity frame by frame. This new film came out of a desire to explode seconds of Venice that appear in “The Red Hotel.”
Blue Venice / Red Hotel
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Toronto artist Andy Patton’s account of breaking his back was adapted to performance by Judith Doyle in 1981. Mounted at the now-legendary Funnel Experimental Film Centre in Toronto, “Transcript – On Pain” was presented in the form of recorded voice-over with slides of text. Andy Patton described his trauma with extraordinary clarity and insight. For “the last split second,” Judith Doyle uses her original voice recording from “Transcript” as a base for imagery. Glass shatters into light. A hospital corridor is reframed into the “tunnel vision” of shock. Medical scans, anatomical drawings, and animations of the brain and spine reveal luminous details within the body. Meanwhile, a hospital worker uneasily removes a brace from a patient’s skull with a standard-issue hardware store screwdriver. As the story moves from shock to pain, we return to the collision scene and to personal identity and history.
last split second, the
