Film Categories: Childhood

  • The Hares (Las Liebres)

    Winter night. Mariano plays with his older sisters in a room on a country house. His father looks for him to take him hunting. Mariano would rather stay at home but his father takes him anyway.

  • Arvind

    After his mentally ill mother is released from prison, Arvind, a 16 year-old biracial queer teenager in Austin, Texas, revisits old family wounds when he writes and produces a play written from his mother’s perspective. When his relationship with the actress who portrays his mother on stage deepens, it sets Arvind on a course that will change his perception of his past.

  • Viloma

    Kalpana is a young artist from the Indian state of Kashmir, who is blessed with an unusual talent that she has painstakingly learned from her aging guru. As her hand creates an artistic image on paper, a second meaningful picture miraculously materialises when the picture is rotated, depicting the antithesis of the first image, and invoking an ancient Hindu belief that life is full of dualities. Urged by her guru to share this talent and its underlying message with the world, young Kalpana enters her “reversible creations” in an international art contest … with surprising results. The story is told…

  • If I Were Any Further Away I’d Be Closer to Home

    A silent poem reflecting on the place of my mother’s birth and her first traces on earth. A generational portrait of South Asian “makers” becomes a perceptual voyage into memory, experience, and touch.

  • The Spectre Watches Over Her

    A reaction to the seminal text by Swiss anthropologist Paul Wirz entitled Exorcism and the Art of Healing in Ceylon, this high contrast hand processed film considers a history of colonialism and ethnographic practices in South Asia. At my mother’s village, I re-staged an exorcism once performed on her in the early 1960s when she was a little girl. Possessed by the lecherous entity known as the Kalu Kumara, the Sanni Yakuma healing ritual was performed over a 12-hour period.

  • Without Consent

    “Without Consent” weaves a young woman’s personal account of forced adoption in Australia in the late 1960s. It recounts the legal climate that outcast young unmarried women who were pregnant during these years, the systemized abuse they endured in the name of God as well as the stories they hid.

  • Open Recess

    This short and sweet animation charmingly depicts the true story of a childhood romance between two girls.

  • [untitled & unlabeled]

    In this very personal experimental work, director Terry Jones reflects upon the moment he was told he was “different” and how that left an imprint on the narrative of his life.

  • ALTERATIONS

    J’s manic depressive mother, Mary Jane, had a heart attack when J told her that she wanted to live as a woman. Now J is making a movie to sort things out. When Mary Jane awoke from her coma, she woke up believing that she is someone else. J’s brother insists that J patches things up with their amnesiac mother and when the two meet again for the first time as women, an innocent, weekend adventure to face each other’s fears manages to keep their monsters at bay. Protected by their new identities, the two women find a best friend…

  • Sophie’s Letter

    During the composition of the letter to her abusive father, Sophie identifies with her inner wounded child (Little Sophie) and gradually finds what she needs to grow beyond the limits and boundaries that were burned into her psyche so many years earlier.