Film Categories: art & artists

  • Byron Chief-Moon: Grey Horse Rider

    Byron Chief-Moon is a multi-talented actor, stuntman, dancer, choreographer, playwright, founder of the Coyote Arts Percussive Performance Association, and member of the Blackfoot Confederacy, member of the Blood Band. Through his art and his life, Chief-Moon’s story is one of cultural survival. Themes of his dance creations begin with his people’s traditional stories, his attachment with the land and his community, as well as the inner conflict he faces in existing within the Aboriginal culture and the wider community. He is ensuring the preservation of his native language through its incorporation in his work. As well, he’s firm in his…

  • Dear Guy

    “Dear Guy” dramatizes an inward and sometime romantically sentimental meditation on the relevance, remembrance and acculturation of Guy Debord’s life and works. The layered histrionics of the film engender reconsiderations of identification, moral responsibility, nostalgia and the potential of art in contemporary society. Excerpts from Debord’s memoir and fictional epistolary monologues are combined with an eclectic assortment of appropriated materials, invented leitmotifs, lecture performances, hybrid forms of the essay film, documentary and edutainment formats. “Dear Guy” drifts through a labyrinth-like montage structure that frustrates passive viewing while inviting contemplation. “DEAR GUY is an energetic response and thoughtful companion piece to…

  • Digital Nudes in Oil

    A short documentary of the artist working in his studio speaking about his painting, modernism, formalism and censorship in Canada from a gay perspective.

  • Moving Images – The Film-Makers’ Cooperative Relocates

    The day the Film-Makers’ Cooperative was forced by loss of lease to move from their offices at Lexington Ave. and 31st Street in New York City, filmmaker and Coop member Joel Schlemowitz showed up with a camera to document the historic moment. On the soundtrack Jonas Mekas, one of the Coop’s founders, and MM Serra, the current executive director, describe the Coop’s beginnings, the organization’s recent struggles, and the difficulties of finding space for the arts.

  • Vegetable or Fruit, Weed, Stalk or Root?

    “Vegetable or Fruit, Weed, Stalk or Root?” is a 16-minute documentary about the 28th Rhubarb! Theatre Festival at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre.

  • Occupant, The

    “The further away you go, the closer to home you get… It is true by way of geography…” Now that she has traveled land and sea, little Romny is about to meet the 360th degree of her trajectory. She reflects upon her journey and faces her duty to carry on.

  • NYC Dilemma

    In 2002-2003, San Francisco composer Jack Curtis Dubowsky moved to a fifth-floor walk-up in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. This semi-verité musical video by Todd Wilson (Under One Roof), shot entirely in one day, documents the great dilemmas of NYC life. Go to the survival job, or attend a business meeting with a potential client (portrayed by real-life client and director Elizabeth Elson [Born in a Barn])? Eat lunch or scavange? How hot is it outside? How to afford a gym? And, the greatest mystery of all, if this is an “E train running on the F line,” is it an…

  • Shadow Tracing

    A young Chinese woman challenged by identity and history, but enchanted with retro filmmaking in a digital world, makes a life decision – to purchase a vintage, hand-crank movie camera. The camera recalls images of wacky “Hollywood Chinatowns” from Hollywood films made in Colonialist times. While examining it, and dreaming of becoming a cameraman herself, she discovers the marks of former Chinese owners, and she envisions historical scenes that the camera may have seen in China. Her wishes are fulfilled as she films the streets of her own hood, in Toronto’s Asian community.

  • Dead Boyfriends

    Fire! Blood! Puppet death! Follow the fate of foolish Coyote as he falls for vampy Pandora, a cursed temptress with a taste for dodgy circus performers. Coyote gets drawn deeper into Pandora’s lair of love as each of her lovers dies mid-act. This dark comedic short by Cirque Du Soleil clown Mooky Cornish and performance artist Xstine P. Cook was shot in the beautiful foothills of southern Alberta, combining live-action & puppet sequences to tell Coyote’s sordid tale. A creepy puppet band from hell accompanies a gory feast of accidental deaths performed by stop-motion, shadow, marionette, and hand and rod…

  • Searching For Wallenberg

    Drawings and text bring to life a poem by Isa Milman. …..Someone named Vera is looking for Raoul Wallenberg; he was last seen in a Soviet prison, scratching into the stone wall. Isa was born in a DP camp in Europe; she now lives in Victoria and has published a second volume of poems.