Film Categories: body

  • Short Story, A

    A humorous look at a young girl’s reaction when she discovers that her younger sister is suddenly taller than she is. Faced with the reality that she will be short for the rest of her life, she tries to adapt as best as she can. Being a short person living in a world geared to tall people is not easy. Eventually, she joins a group of short people whose aim is to unobtrusively scale the world down to their size and slowly make their presence felt. Note: Available in French language.

  • Signal

    A woman patient becomes both the subject and site of an ophthalmologist’s probe. “Signal” parallels an eye examination with semaphore codes to suggest that the modern visualizing technologies used in science and the military have colonized the body and forever changed the boundaries reached, the vision, and the language of the individual self.

  • Skin Flick

    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.

  • Speakbody

    Using techniques from documentary, the avant-garde, and narrative films, a great deal of information about abortion is compressed into a short time. The film combines the interwoven multi-layered voices of women recounting their experiences with minimal images from one woman’s memory. Short but powerful.

  • Between Friends

    Jen Roberts, a young photographer in her mid-twenties, has many friends, a partner she cares about, and a flourishing career. Upon discovering she is HIV positive her world turns upside down. The film addresses the issue of women and AIDS and helps to dispell the myth that AIDS is an exclusively gay disease. The story is open-ended as the central character is brought to a point of decision, leaving viewers primed to question their choice(s) in similar circumstances.

  • We’re Talking Vulva

    A five-foot, six-inch rappin’ vulva, in an unexpected parody of the music video genre, leads the viewer on a complete description of female genitalia.

  • When the Mind Hears

    “When the Mind Hears” is part of an ongoing body of work in both photography and film. This work was motivated by the challenges I face in communicating to my daughter who is deaf. It stems from my observation and my own experiences of growing up different. This black-and-white film is an abstract response to visual memory and sensory development. (AH) “…with distance, respect and the unromantic gaze, children are observed: they run with an unshakable sense that the earth will support them. Underwater shots of a swan swimming, webbed feet pushing against the water moving it aside to propel…

  • X

    A profound and powerful experimental, personal film of one woman’s despair, rage and exhibitionism; a baroque fugue of identity chanting growing from women’s pain to a holistic, self-healing naming ritual.

  • Panic Bodies

    “Filmed in the shadow of AIDS, ‘Panic Bodies’ is Hoolboom’s testament to the permanent impermanence of the flesh. The film’s six parts show the range of Hoolboom’s engagement with mortality, from rage to reverie … Whether he’s remixing ‘Terminator 2’ or concocting a female paradise, Hoolboom finds a balance between razor-sharp intellect and palpable love for images and sounds. To watch ‘Panic Bodies’ is to see what it means to live and die in the cinema.” – Cameron Bailey, NOW “Paul Rioeur said the toughest things humans have to face are that we die and not everyone loves us. ‘Panic…

  • Swell

    Desire disorients and bodily swellings result. “A lovely concoction of hand-tinted and scratched film evoking a woman’s flight from concrete to nature – spurred on by a kiss.” – Gordon Bowness, Xtra!