“The Smell of Burning Ants” is a haunting documentary on the pains of growing up male. It explores the inner and outer cruelties that boys perpetrate and endure. Through formative events of a boy’s life, we come to understand the ways in which men can become emotionally disconnected and alienated from their feminine side. The common dismissal that “boys will be boys” evolves into the chilling realization that boys frequently become angry, destructive, and emotionally disabled men. “The Smell of Burning Ants” illustrates how boys are socialized by fear, power and shame. The burning of ants is one of the metaphors for the impact that boyhood violence has on us all. Though the film focuses on the painful aspects of male socialization, it also incorporates subtle humour and moments of boyhood celebration. “The Smell of Burning Ants” is entertaining as well as educational, and provides a unique opportunity to begin the process of healing the wounds of childhood. Winner of 18 awards including: Grand Prize, Hamburg International Film Festival; Best of Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival; Best Documentary, Tampere International Short Film Festival; First Prize, Short Films, Locarno International Film Festival; First Place, Film, Athens International Film and Video Festival; Best of the Best, Charlotte Film Festival; Best Experimental Film, Melbourne International Film Festival; Artistic Courage Award, Florida Film Festival. Also screened at the Sundance Film Festival.
Filter Films
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“Small Pleasures” is the first Chinese-Canadian feature film made by a Chinese-Canadian. It is about two young women from Beijing studying in Toronto, who experience life in the West during the Tiananmen Square student demonstrations in 1989.
Small Pleasures
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It is a wooden silver-retrieving sluice – thus light-catch awash with something like “cheek and jowl clippings of Argentine bulls” (as Hollis Frampton reminds us) and many chemical residues of earth. My mind has grown TREE out of the forest of it all. (SB)
Sluice
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In Hindu mythology, dance represents the rhythm of life and Shiva – god of creative and destructive forces- is master of the dance. As Shiva imagines the creation of the world in his mind’s eye, the forms, the textures and movements found in air, earth and water are revealed. Satisfied with his plan, Shiva brings the world into being and in the end is united with his creation. This film was created by animating three-dimensional objects on a colour photocopier.
Slow Dance World
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James Anderson’s exuberant paper cell animation “Slap Happy Jim” features a skinny man in a canoe (with a bicycle on his head) who faces all manners of unexpected travails.
Slap Happy Jim
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As a textual surface, skin becomes the privileged vehicle for the representation of history. A site from which culture defines spatial concepts of containment and exclusion, the marked skin is the point of entry for an analysis of institutions, economic processes and ethical systems. A metaphor for external boundaries, the tattoo traces an architectural system of social discipline applicable to prisons, factories, schools, warehouses: all the places that operate on principles of isolation and surveillance.
Skin Flick
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A loosely coiled length of yarn (story)… wound on a reel – my parenthesis! This is a painted film (inspired by Nolde’s “unpainted pictures”): “skins” of paint hung in a weave of light. (SB)
Skein
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“Beating” – to get beaten or give a beating, to beat oneself up. To beat the odds. Metal is forged by beating. Birds beat their wings, the sun beats down, and our hearts… “Beating” exists in the area of boundaries. I work with images as they can be registered between abstraction and representation, between blurred and defined, between the formless and the formed – in-between, in motion. I try to render images suggestively, bodily and to use vocalizations and words for texture as well as information. (BS) “Water, like fire, is a dimension of the carnival insisting on the stateless and the flux … a world in which hierarchies were collapsing, boundaries dissolving … a state of becoming, not of being.” – Robert Kroetsch “Beating” considers horror/ fascination, evil/good, dark/light, and the relation between these terms, the one the flip side of the other. “Beating” sees history through the personal, expressing the anger, pain and fear suppressed in the denial of oppressive situations. “Beating” looks at and listens to the parts of ourselves (myself) hidden in shadow. “‘Beating’ is impelled by an obsessive devotion to bodies sacred and profane, raised in the light of the everyday to something akin to wonder…these bodies shimmering in the light of a history too terrible to remember. Or to forget… With the eye of a fetishist she searches the body’s topograhy for clues of oppression. And finds it here.” – Kika Thorne, Pleasure Dome The film’s surface, scratched and mottled, negative and positive, black & white and colour bears witness to storms of emotion. The film is sectioned; 3 min. – 12 min. segments, internally cohesive in terms of content and treatment have been edited into a dramatic whole. From section to section, repetitions occur, connections are made – reminiscences, equivalences between different images – to achieve the feeling or recognition that everything is related, it is all there all the time. “This supremely lyrical ‘beating’ makes some brutal connections.” – Peter Goddard, Toronto Star “In this collage of images is played out the paradoxical intertwining of hate and love… Sternberg’s films affect through their rhythmic pulses, films that set in place many complex networks…” – Barbara Godard
Beating
