“From Nevis To” is a seven-minute docu-drama that deals with Juliet Jones, a new arrival to Canada. From her arrival to the airport to her ride to the hotel room, many thoughts about her past, present and her future surround her. She tells of what her life was like in her home country, Nevis in the West Indies, what she had heard about her new country, and the family and lifestyle that she leaves behind. We hear her thoughts in voice over and we see her coming up against and interacting with her new environment, which bears little resemblance to her real home.
Filter Films
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FROGLIGHT is a film about having faith in the unknown. “…glowing, shimmering, wow – and sentiments to or rather thinking, questioning, wondering… wondering, beautiful.” – Barbara Sternberg (Toronto filmmaker) “A shimmering black-and-white reflection of ineffable and wondrous experience.” – Jim Sinclair (Pacific Cinematheque, Vancouver) Award: Honourable Mention, Ann Arbor Film Festival, 2000. DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT: In FROGLIGHT, poetic voice-over narration is woven with images and sounds from the natural landscape to engage viewers’ imaginations. As a result of allowing elements to come magically together in the creative process, the film has an intangible sensibility that echoes the experience of trying to trust in something that cannot be seen or touched. FROGLIGHT is an exploratory film made during a five-day hand-processing retreat led by Canadian experimental filmmaker Philip Hoffman. The film is in memory of Phil’s wife, Marian McMahon – filmmaker, academic and independent curator. Her ideas and suggestions were instrumental in the development of FROGLIGHT.
Froglight
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“I wanted to make a shamelessly pretty movie. A sexy, jazzy, sleazy little piece. I built up various tableaux using satin, silk and lace. I scattered glass baubles, costume pearls, sequins, glitter; and when it started to torch I brought in the pagan elements-select cards from the Tarot de Paris, the Aquarian Tarot, the Rider Tarot and Crowley’s Thoth. I threw down the Lovers, I threw down the Thrice Pierced Heart and the Tower, The Fall from Grace. Then I brought in the boy and took his clothes off and read Barthes’ ‘Le corps de l’autre (The Body of the Other)’ and when it all became very Las Vegas and very Religious and very Vulgar, I mixed in a little opera and drew the curtains shut.” – Anna Proulx, translated by John Gagné A collaboration between John Gagné and Anna Proulx. The music is from an old Eumig cassette of Music for Home Movies. The opera is from a busker in Munich.
Antediluvian
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“Fresh Blood” is a hybrid documentary blending personal narrative and a video-essay style. The piece engages issues of Jewish racialized identity, Arab/Jewish dichotomies and the ways these come together in Iraqi Jewish culture, and the personal implications of the politics of Palestine and of the Jewish holocaust. The artist returns to a land of remembering and forgetting. With her first language lost it is difficult to communicate with her grandmother, and yet there is humour and poignancy in their resulting exchanges. In seeking out her biological father, Yael questions the significance of blood relations. She revisits and revises family memory and myth.
Fresh Blood: A Consideration of Belonging
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“This is one of the most assured films I have ever seen. In the simplest of frames, in monologue, Vancouver actor Callum Rennie plays a man remembering his lover lost to AIDS. Hoolboom fills his words with blood and the space behind Rennie with blood-rich images. Eight minutes of pure, perfect cinema.” – Cameron Bailey, NOW “The overwhelming losses brought about by the AIDS crisis have, in recent years, stimulated a body of artwork of extraordinary passion and urgency. In ‘Frank’s Cock,’ Mike Hoolboom, one of Canada’s most prolific experimental filmmakers, uses multiple screens as a backdrop to a man, facing the camera, telling the story of a relationship severed by AIDS. The visuals are hypnotic – here, the stark beauty of an individual, shot in black and white, is juxtaposed with a stream of impressionistic colour images. In a beautifully modulated performance, Callum Rennie plays a character whose lover, Frank, is dying. The emotional tenor of Rennie’s monologue builds delicately but steadily, as the details of his relationship with Frank unfold, an achievement which is particularly significant given the film is only eight minutes long. ‘Frank’s Cock’ deservedly garnered Hoolboom the NFB Award for best Canadian short at the Toronto film festival.”- Karen Tisch, Take One Awards: Best Canadian Short Film, Toronto International Festival, 1994; Kodak Prize, Locarno Film Festival, 1994; Best Dramatic Film, Ann Arbor Film Festival, 1994; Best Gay/Lesbian Film, Albany International Festival,1995; Award, Interfilm Festival, Berlin, 1995; Second Prize Experimental, Big Muddy Festival, 1995
Frank’s Cock
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“The American not living every minute of every day in a daily way does not make what he has to say to be soothing he wants what he has to say to be exciting, and to move as everything moves, not to move as emotion is moving but to move as anything that really moves is moving… Think of American life as it is lived, they all move so much because in moving they know for certain they can know it any way but in moving they really know it as certain that they are not daily living.” – Gertrude Stein A circular, sinusoidal pan, a traffic report, and a weather report are looped, repeated, and re-printed, yielding an ominous, obsessive rendering of space and time.
Framing Factory
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A romp across the filmmaker’s dance floor of life. A personal reflection on film, dance and living queer.
My Life in Dance
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“Variously relaxed, apprehensive, or relieved, the fractured gestures of a woman and a baby are played backward and forward, frame by frame, like a musical phrase.” -Ian Birnie “‘Fracture’ presents the viewer with a narrative riddle, one which isrelated directly to the nature of parallel construction … The narrative construction (and I emphasize the latter word) is comprised of 18 shots. These shots are, in fact, optical renditions of two primary shots or scenes which are the woman and child, and the male ‘intruder’ … ‘Fracture’ successfully isolates and exploits basic cinematic codes and conventions, such as screen direction and open-frame composition, in the creation of an implied and poetic narrative.” – Al Razutis
Fracture
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Four short animated films on one reel: The Magician’s Hat: A magician discovers more than a white rabbit in his hat with hilarious results. Making Faces: A simple blank figure is transformed into eighty different characters. A study of the variety of human faces. Alleycats: Alleycats are disappearing all over town! The solution to this mystery may lie behind the curtains of an apartment building. Computer animation. Eye to Eye: In this computer-animated film a man loses control of the parts of his face. Note: Also available from the filmmaker are four flipbooks from the Books That Move Series.
Four Short Animated Films
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This film profiles three Japanese women artists. Monterey-born Grace Munakata works with abstract collages which evoke an attempt to locate her family’s past, especially her parents’ lives in internment camps. Japanese-born Rumi Sakata has worked for the past twenty years as a traditional brush painter. Her life celebrates freedom and individuality within her own traditional mode of artistic achievement. The third artist, Jan Yonemoto, fronts a Jazz fusion quintet, Crosswinds. Her musical artistry celebrates talent over gender.
Another Day in America
