Elle-vis: A Woman…Impersonating a Man…Impersonating a Legend Collectively written, produced and directed by a trio of young Toronto filmmakers, “Elle-vis” is an irreverent and offbeat half-hour comedy about a renowned Elvis impersonator who is barred from performing by the all-powerful Elvis Impersonators Union after a lurid tabloid newspaper reveals the slanderous fact that he is… a woman. On the evening of her comback performance, Angela becomes the reluctant centre of a storm of controversy and protest. Outside the nightclub where she is to perform, a crowd of ardent feminists and loyal fans clash with an angry mob of union supporters, rednecks and jealous Elvis impersonators. On the homefront, Angela’s boyfriend, resenting the effects of Angela’s career on their relationship, stomps our on her in a fury. Her meticulous preparations are further frustrated by her fussy mother and her pushy agent. Angela just wants to be left alone to do what she does best – impersonate the King.
Filter Films
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Kynth, a night creature, experiences emotional and cultural shock as she finds herself in love in the twentieth century. Suddenly she is awakened from centuries of deathful loneliness. Her new lover, a filmmaker, re-introduces her to the sights of the daytime world. She discovers too late, however, that this human she has come to rely upon knows as little about living as she, the undead. She finds out that even a vampire can cry.
Angst
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“Hollis and I came back to Toronto on holiday in the summer of ’67. We were staying at a friend’s house. We worked our way through the city and eventually made it to the island. We followed each other around. We enjoyed ourselves. We said we were going to make a film about each other – and we did.” – Joyce Wieland “A & B in Ontario” was completed eighteen years after the original material was shot. After Frampton’s death, the film was assembled by Wieland into a cinematic dialogue in which the collaborators (in the spirit of the sixties) shoot each other with cameras.
A & B in Ontario
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This solo performance for the camera pays homage to 1970s video art, exploring how the electronic manipulation of the video signal can create a choreocinema for body and machine. Choreographic patterns melding retro moves with a minimalist aesthetic participate in a jagged, pulsing duet with the danceable beats and noisy textures of the track “Doing My Rounds, Checking Some Rounds” by Alterity Problem (Alexander Moskos and Joel Taylor). Effects were created in real-time with a raster-scan device built by Nam June Paik and Shuya Abe, accessed during a residency at the now-closed Experimental TV Center in upstate New York.
Doing My Rounds, Checking Some Rounds
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This abstract cut-out animation attempts to create orderly pixel patterns using only hand-cut and hand-arranged materials, without any grids, rulers, or visual guides. A stream-of-consciousness series of abstract patterns dance, transform, answer to one another, and at times evolve into recognizable icons, as if sending subliminal messages from a child’s play session. Back-lit pastel colorscapes reflect the airy, other-wordly transmission of Julia Holter’s song “So Lillies” .
Auroratone
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Playing on the classic backstage drama, this short musical featuring Jef Barbara’s I Know I’m Late embeds the story of its own making into a fantasy performance in the dressing room of a Montreal cabaret. A chorus of backup dancers distracts the star of the show as he explains his tardiness through song. The film culminates in a dance routine reminiscent of ’90s MTV music videos and offers an appreciative reflection of idiosyncratic individuality, community and inclusion.
I Know I’m Late
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This video pays stylistic homage to girl punks and 1960’s rock and roll girl groups. Camera moves and mise-en-scene are inspired by the 1963 music film for “He’s Got the Power” by the Exciters. The video responds to the song’s theme of menstruation by presenting a series of celebratory images of female solidarity.
28 Days
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The film takes the form of a three-tiered hallucination: a dream within a dream within a dream. A pharaoh time travels from the future to ancient Egypt and dreams of a medieval tavern where people are suffering from the Black Plague. In the tavern, on the brink of death, an old crone tells her life story. The woman’s story, narrated in old English song, alludes to her salvation by the appearance of an alicorn borne by her younger sister. Themes of women’s stories, power, and transgression are woven throughout the narrative.
The Alicorn
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An Asian Canadian man comes home with a new boyfriend for Christmas to find his younger brother, who is also gay, resentful for being left to care for their aging parents
Kimchi Fried Dumplings
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A series of Vaudeville acts inserted between the lines of reality, meant to demonstrate the ephemerality of all things. Music by Wm. Moraldo.
Entr’acte
