Film Categories: body

  • Landmarks of Memory

    A tattoo ritual and hookah session memorializes a pre-war flower shop. After seeing its storefront in archival footage of the Lebanese Civil War, a first-generation daughter seeks information and connection to place. Scenes of 1976 Beirut are paired with today’s developed landscape, while roses are etched and coconut coals burn in a snowy diasporic setting.

  • Menders

    What story do the marks of time tell? “Menders” is a three-minute animation following a female art conservator restoring Velázquez’s “Rokeby Venus.” Using creative methods that reveal imperfections and embrace fragmentation, she navigates the tension between a polished ideal and an unvarnished history. As she reflects on both the artwork’s past and her own identity, she asks: Can the beauty of art be found in its scars? This film invites viewers to see restoration as a dynamic process of making, unmaking, and remaking.

  • Uncle Bardo

    Through an innovative blend of documentary, archival film manipulation, and experimental stop-motion animation, Uncle Bardo delves into the memories of an estranged family member who has undergone a near-death experience and awakens lost between two worlds. Rooted in the industrial landscape of Hamilton Ontario, we get lost in Uncle Bardo’s memories of a coma as he strives to find his sense of reality and recover his health.

  • Tether

    An unfulfilled family man is transported back to a time where he felt most alive, on the stage as a drag performer.

  • Don’t Take My Joy Away

    In the Shatila Palestinian camp in Lebanon, two friends, Omar and Omar, find moments of joy amid hardship until sudden violence forces them to confront loss and survival.

  • A Flame the Colour of Air

    Medieval Catholic mystic Hildegard von Bingen reconciles the virgin/whore dichotomy in a psychedelic, erotic vision. Hildegard was known for her waking visions of the divine, her musical compositions, and her extensive medical encyclopedias. The animated imagery in this film is inspired by her surviving transcriptions, which suggest a departure from the mainstream views of her culture. In this speculative fictional tale, Hildegard has a vision in which erotic dancers appear to her as embodiments of the divine. The narration is strategically selected and collaged from Hildegard’s texts.

  • Resting Place

    For those living with invisible illness we often find ourselves repetitively returning to rest. Resting Place captures the filmmaker returning to bed, reflecting on their experience living with chronic illness. The work utilizes multiple exposures to illustrate the ritual of rest.

  • House of Pain

    “A bold and startling work filled with images at once beautiful and profoundly disturbing, the film is a hybrid of DeSade, Dali and Bataille, a nightmare that takes place somewhere between sleep and death. A profound testament of the body at its limits, whose fantastical vantages lend the body a rare grace… Leave the inner child at home.” – Bill Evans, Metro Cinema “The Canadian avant-garde has found its Salo, and its name is ‘House of Pain.’ Prolific, hugely talented Toronto/Vancouver/Toronto experimental filmmaker Mike Hoolboom’s new feature must be the most transgressive Canadian film ever made. Shot in black-and-white and…

  • I Object

    “I Object” is a film which explores images of women. It focuses on two women students who are confronted with the contradictions of their dual role as model and photographer. The film raises questions about the motivations for nude modelling, how women become objects, and how women deal with sexual stereotypes in educational institutions.

  • Iconography of Venus, The

    A look at private and public images of women and their “place” in society. The act of being placed on a visual pedestal of unrealistic proportions and its accompanying expectations. The operatic soundtrack written by the filmmaker is performed by Suzanne Palmer. “Photographs of Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, the Venus de Milo and Venus of Willendorf achieve their stunning resolution in the Louvre where a crowd waits for the enigmatic smile of the Mona Lisa to break into speech, to recover the distance betweeen her sitting and the time of our approach. What we watch with the filmmaker is not…