Film Categories: Childhood

  • Shut Up Barbie

    The film is a reaction to the obsession a seven-year-old girl has with her many Barbie Dolls. The world of Barbie is pushed to its innocuous and tragic conclusions. Ann Knutson plays the role of the mother. “Shut Up Barbie” was pixilated in Tiburon, Ca.

  • Rock Pockets

    A short personal documentary disguised as meta-music video. A sugar rush of sex, politics and rock’n’roll as seen through the eyes of a ten year-old boy at the fair. Featuring appearances by members of Shout Out Out Out Out, The Wet Secrets, and the music of the Vertical Struts (r.i.p.). Awards: Inaugural Lindalee Tracey Award at the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Film Festival

  • Outsiders, The

    “A super-short Super 8 remake camps up the Coppola classic. An obsession of mine, and a lot of other girls, this movie touched my sense of belonging at a time when I felt I had none – teenagehood. Years later, when tomboy-ish has matured into gender-bending queerness, 21 grown ‘girls’ play at ‘boyhood’. Done DIY style, with an ‘unknown’ all-star cast of girls, this film embodies both a music video style of fast cuts and silent film intertitles – a post-post-modern experiment of complicity and resistance.” – Juliana Saragosa Selected screenings: London Lesbian & Gay Film Festival (London, UK), 2006;…

  • They Dance Alone

    A look back on half my life ago, who I wanted to be. Love and longing – lost friendship, belonging, the fear of touch, a magical embrace, a spell to dispel. Hands become a moment of realization – an intense feeling like no other – you realize you love her, but can never have her.

  • Monsoon St., ‘77

    Monsoon St., ’77 tells the story of a day in the life of a young tomboy, Tina, who finds escapism in the rural desert of Arizona in 1977. To compensate for her unhappy surroundings, Tina lives in a rich imaginative world. She finds beauty in the natural landscape and comforts herself by summoning familiar figures from popular culture. These fantasies supply the happiness that is otherwise so lacking in her everyday life.

  • Schogt, Elida: A Film Trilogy

    Newly available on DVD, this trilogy from award-winning filmmaker Elida Schogt examines Holocaust memory, the family and the role of photography in history. (For purchase only. For rentals, see individual titles.) ZYKLON PORTRAIT “Zyklon Portrait” is about Zyklon B – the pesticide transformed into a genocidal weapon by the Nazis in the 1940s. It is also an elegy for the filmmaker’s grandparents; after years of silence, the filmmaker’s mother finally talks about her parents’ horrific fate. A Holocaust film without Holocaust imagery, “Zyklon Portrait “ uses family photographs, underwater photography and hand-painted imagery to draw a personal story out of…

  • Party #4

    “A special one for my first son… his last as a lone ranger (only child). Shot on double-perforation B&W 16mm, the film ran through the camera twice and doubled the consumption of ice cream and cake.” – John Price

  • Fountain of Youth

    The last home movie. Shot on now discontinued Kodachrome 40 super 8 film stock, a cine-poem to time, childhood and the colour of memory.

  • Dandelions

    “Lyrical and full of mirth, this filmmaker wonders out loud in her first film: ‘How do I make myself at home in a landscape made foreign to me?’ Wilkinson looks at her self – black – and ponders in the white landscape called Canada how can she ‘enjoy the flowers’ as she cartwheels with great panache through fields of them. What kind of relationship to the land can she have in a place where she sees herself but where others constantly ask: Where are you from? Wilkinson’s existence vis a vis the land seems to lie somewhere in between the…

  • 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.