Vi-a lesbian and artist-is heartbroken after her lover, Charlie, leaves her. She spends her days and sleepless nights in Charlie’s pyjamas, alternately painting her “inner storm cloud” and abstract images of vaginas. These are strewn about her home amid other signs of her unraveling life. When two bright and happy Evangelicals arrive at her door, Vi lets them into her home and begins questioning them on the nature of love and sin. While the two Christians, who are engaged to be married, attempt to control the conversation, Vi takes it down a path they find increasingly uncomfortable. Gradually an unexpected bond begins to form between Vi and the female Evangelical. The situation builds to an emotional climax just as Charlie bursts through the door.
Filter Films
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Days after his father’s suicide, Jason, a disgruntled teenager, intercepts a series of text messages from what appears to be a mistress. Using his father’s cell phone he sets up a meeting to confront the woman for answers. When they meet neither one are prepared to face the real truth about Jason’s dad.
Jason’s Dad
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In this alternate-history fable set in the 1980’s AIDS Crisis, a closeted young man is thrust into the midst of an anti-government coup and finds that the animal within is stronger than the monsters that oppress.
We Are Animals
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Unable to cope with the murder of his identical twin, a young man resorts to disturbing measures to restore their severed bond.
Severed
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In the heat of summer solar panel reflections blend with butterflies on flowers and a little bird eating the mulberries.
Sous le soleil (Under the Sun)
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SPPP is an autobiographical experimental film exploring the ramifications of the devastating breakup of a romantic relationship. The film examines my own emotional responses in the context of how this experience is culturally represented. Painstakingly handmade, the visual and sound treatments evoke different phases of the relationship (from passionate attachment to escalating conflict to inexplicable breakup) and the various phases of the grieving process – from denial, to yearning, to anger, to final liberation: a healing release effected through the making of this film. A triptych of self-portraits-entire camera rolls, each subjected to different methods of extreme interventions on the celluloid itself-are presented in a series of tableaux punctuated by quotes reflecting on romantic love scratched into the filmstrip. These, along with the sound, are employed as a form of meta-commentary simultaneously foregrounding and deconstructing conventional representations of love, which not only represent but also influence our contemporary experience of the same.
Auto Portrait/Self Portrait Post Partum
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Joaquín La Habana – Lebenzwischenwelten is a documentary portrait of the transformation artist Joaquín La Habana, an androgynous Cuban-born singer, dancer and entertainer, who currently resides in Berlin, Germany. As he plays effortlessly with changing gender and culture, his opera-trained voice switches easily from the baritone of a rebel to the soprano of a seductress. Now in his sixties, Joaquín La Habana reflects on his life and career during the ’70s and ’80s as part of New York City’s provocative underground scene. The film contains impressive archival material, including Joaquín La Habana’s performance at the famous nightclub, Studio 54.
Joaquin La Habana – LebenZwischenWelten (Joaquin La Habana – Living Between Worlds)
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This is a hand-painted and elaborately step-printed collaboration between filmmakers Stan Brakhage and Phil Solomon. After many months of working together step-printing the painted strips of film by Brakhage, Phil Solomon re-discovered the following passage which helped clarify their process and inspired the editing wich then began: “The profound nature of this concept will be better understood, and the positive study of it more successful, if we think of such an organization, in its temporal aspect and scope, as corresponding exactly to what is called in music the phrasing; distinguished both from the melody (which is based on the differences of pitch) and from the rhythm (based on the repetition of an arsis-thesis system). Like rhythm it is based on facts of intensity (nuances) even while its form is extended over a dimension analogous to that of melody. “Whoever distinctly grasps these ideas will feel the importance of what we must call the phrasing of a picture, and for example, the stylistic importance of the differences observable between the slow, full, majestic phrasing of a Veronese (that of Tintoretto is more suave with equal plenitude), the rugged phrasing of Caravaggio (powerful in its boldness, brutal, even a bit melodramatic), the essentially polyphonic and architectonic phrasing of N. Poussin, or again the pathetic and tormented phrasing of Delacroix. It is entirely reasonable to note a likeness with these characteristics in the music of Palestrina, Monteverdi, Bach, or Berlioz.” – “Time in the Plastic Arts” by Etienne Souriau, from Reflections on Art, edited by Susan K. Langer.
Elementary Phrases
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Breathtaking takes on the asbestos industry through a moving and personal investigation into Kathleen’s father’s death from an asbestos-related disease and the current present-day use of asbestos in Canada and internationally. Valued since the beginning of time and commercially mined since the Industrial Revolution, asbestos was coined the ‘magic mineral’ for its extraordinary capacity to protect against fire, and was used in everything from brake pads to oven mitts. Discovered to be carcinogenic, the use of asbestos was banned in many countries and the use of it limited in others. Canada, along with Russia and several other countries, still mines asbestos and exports it for use in developing nations. With moving clips of her dying father’s legal testimony, family photos and Super 8 home movies as a narrative springboard, Mullen takes the audience on an investigative journey from her family’s home in British Columbia to Quebec, India and Detroit, painting a global, yet still personal picture of the many lives affected by the continued use of asbestos. “As I began Breathtaking, everyone to whom I mentioned I was making the film responded with a personal story of their own,” Mullen says. “I soon realized that this story was a lot bigger than just my own family’s grief. “For all those who missed the film, Breathtaking, be sure and see it when you can. It is a beautiful tribute to Kathleen’s dad. The film itself is a great combination of KM’s personal style, in her use of the super 8 (a true tribute to her dad), her experimental aesthetics and the documentary form itself.” -Melissa Levin, artist “Filmmaker Mullen’s skill as a storyteller is once again confirmed. In this instance she deftly balances third-person dispassion with first-person experience that speaks to the heart of anyone who has witnessed a bedside passing.”-James Wegg Reviews
Breathtaking
