Using experimental narrative structure as his vehicle, Benning recreates the sensationalized and controversial circumstances surrounding Lorencia Bembenek, aka Bambi, former Playboy bunny turned cop, turned accused and convicted killer who disappeared after a daring escape from prison. The film shows the evolution of Benning’s and Bembenek’s relationship, presented through their actual letters read in voice-over, which depict the filmmaker’s curiosity with the subject as it evolves from intrigue to a love obsession.
Filter Films
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Sketches about three heroin addicts in Montreal by ex-junkie filmmaker John L’Ecuyer. A stream-of-consciousness narration sails the viewer through Montreal’s underworld of characters: Red Theo, a dealer that treats his clients like family despite all the difficulties inherent in such a lifestyle; Nice Guy Nelson, a heroin addict that sought escape from reality by any means necessary, including auto-mutilation; and Brenda, a young woman at one time loved life but fell into the netherworld of heroin addiction, prostitution and AIDS.
Use Once and Destroy
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The first section of the film consists of a no-image sound-track recording of a Yiddish language course that teaches us those expressions that will come in handy when we are far from home and need a toilet or a postage stamp. As Jacobs points out, there is of course, no country where Yiddish is a native language. There are pockets of elder citizens in various countries who speak it, as the members of the family whom we see later in the film do, but it is essentially an extinct language, the product of an oral tradition and only as a dead language is it a course of study. The second section of the film consists of silent 16mm home movies filmed in the ‘30s and ‘40s by Stella Weiss, a relative of Jacobs’ wife. Jacobs’ title refers to these transplanted people who in image after image display their smiles, dresses, children, tricycles, roller-skates and cars for the family camera – itself a leftover from a rich uncle. The movie footage from this family album is not manipulated by Jacobs, but speak silently, in Yiddish, for itself. The return of darkness and the Yiddish soundtrack at the end makes the irony of the film more pointed. Situation 8 of the lesson teaches us how to communicate “when you’re in trouble.” Yet if one thinks of the horrors in store for the Jews in Germany in the ‘30s and ‘40s, these everyday phrases seem sadly inadequate.
Urban Peasants
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A child is given birth in the womb of its dead mother. Child’s eyes perceive the death of the city. The last birth combined with the fire and destruction. The pure feeling… mind motion. The Urban Fire. OUTSIDE “Snow-blind on the street, there’s a glimpse of a Brick Wall. The heat of freeze acts on your eyes; one great glowing asprockalips, the bubblin’ sabbatier.” – Philip Hoffman
Urban Fire
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“Upon Waking” explores the family ritual of image gathering. A personal narrative which chronicles a fictitious bond between the filmmaker and her great-great grandmother through journals. Visual imagery, incorporating both film and video, works to create a metaphor of intervention and celebration of the gendered self.
Upon Waking
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Based on a bus ride across Canada, both the sound track and visuals are content-laden collages that celebrate the work of alternative community cultural groups – women’s bands, poets, artists unions, and community radio – against a backdrop of unemployment. Music by Clive Robertson accompanies the cut-out animated images.
Up to Scratch
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This portrait of a guinea fowl is the first clear vision I’ve had of the hot-blooded dinosaurs still living among us. (SB)
Bird
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Using stock footage from NFB’s Nature Studies, puppetry, and real-life clips, Francis Leeming and Cathy Quinn draw an analogy of women as flowers who need nurturing by positive female role models. Entitled “The Untilled Story,” the film is a pun that plays on notions of Mother Nature and Man’s Science and technology. Part of Five Feminist Minutes.
Untilled Story, The
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“In ‘Unknown Soldiers’, Veronika Soul uses experimental film techniques to create a visual and aural mélange that features children’s harrowing tales of wartime Japan, a retelling of ‘Godzilla,’ a Japanese tourist atop the Empire State Building, and a meditation on the role of the hamburger in the life of a traveller… Hers is an original, amusing and sometimes distrurbing vision of East-West relations.” – Karen Cooper, Director of Film Forum, NYC
Unknown Soldiers
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An unexpected encounter between a small boy and a toy unicorn is intended to encourage children’s imagination through the suggestion of magic. This visual poem includes an elementary school study pamphlet which explores the art of story-telling, introduction of myth and an awareness of changing cityscapes. French and English study guide availabe.
Unicorn
