Film Categories: Families

  • My Father’s Idea of Heaven

    Using found and manipulated Super 8 footage from his family archives, RM Vaughan explores his late father’s bizarre HAM radio hobby.

  • 50/fifty

    “50/fifty“ uses old home movies and hand-processed film to pay homage to the memory of the filmmaker’s father, who passed away when she was young.

  • Taking My Skin

    “I’m not aware of you taking my skin,” says the artist’s mother to the camera as it zooms in on her eye as close as the lens will allow. “Taking My Skin” tracks a dialogue between the artist and her mother. Their exchange ranges from narrating the filming process “in the moment” to relations in an earlier time – “how long do you think it takes for a child to become separate?” Throughout the journey film spaces continuously dissolve and collapse only to separate again. Sometimes the artist is behind the camera, sometimes the mother, sometimes both simultaneously behind and…

  • 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.

  • Dance with Me

    The impressionist, lyrical style of the film is a departure for Nicolaou, who describes this film as “one half documentary and one half fictional narrative.” The film is a collage visually and thematically, though the narration serves to anchor the piece with a freestyle kind of story telling. Nicolaou drew upon experiences in her own life when creating the film. She incorporates footage from her family’s home movies of the 60s and 70s. “A haunting portrayal of the yearning for intimacy between parent and child.” – Henry Mietkiewicz, Toronto Star Life always appears to be more joyous in old home…

  • Purple Lipstick

    Purple is the colour of a fresh bruise. Haley’s latest videopoem, “Purple Lipstick” confronts the insidious nature of domestic violence through compelling juxtapositions. A disembodied female voice employs vivid language, absurdist against a backdrop of banality, images of “normal” family life. Numb in her isolation and still in her nurse’s uniform, a wife and mother prepares dinner. The inherent terror of her homelife is invoked with excruciating tension. Its brutality can only be alluded to.

  • Still Light

    A pregnant moment from Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” triggers this haunting exploration of lineage, memory, and loss. Using a combination of 16mm and Super 8 film, “Still Light” journeys through a forest of old photographs, shadowed by the ethereal voice of Kim Novak.

  • Dying for the Pleasure

    “Dying for the Pleasure” is the result of a poem-as-script strategy. It is a darkly humorous, kaleidoscopic trip down Memory Lane, the audience witness to a woman’s anxiety surrounding the loss of our humanity after we “crawl inside,” to become enveloped, shielded, and cut off from others by a body of steel. Director: Katrin Bowen Writer, Producer: Heather Haley

  • In the Dark (À l’ombre)

    A mother who has recently been incarcerated refuses to give up on her young son, no matter how fragile their connection may now be.

  • Folk Songs

    “This lyrical and impressionistic rumination on the filmmaker’s Bulgarian heritage explores the impact of family and tradition, the links between the old world and the new, and the simple, lovely gestures that unite generations.” – Hot Docs International Documentary Film Festival, Toronto In 1913, Sophia and Dimitry Makedonsky were teenagers when they left the Ukraine for the United States. Growing up in the Midwest, filmmaker LeAnn Erickson often heard stories of the “old country” her grandparents had left behind. As Erickson travels to Russia, the search for her sense of “place” sparks a re-examination of her family’s immigrant past. Her…