Film Categories: Families

  • Rules of the Road

    “Rules of the Road” tells the story of a love affair and its demise through one of the primary objects shared by the couple: an old beige station wagon with fake wood paneling along the sides. A typical American family car for an atypical American family, it provides them at first with all the familiar comforts. But when their relationship ends, the car becomes the property of one woman and the bane of the other’s existence. Even long after their separation, this tangible reminder of their life together – and thousands of its imitators- continues to prowl the streets of…

  • Scavengers, The

    A post-war fable. A young man is sent by his mother to search for his sister, long since lost. He moves slowly from a rural to an urban environment. He experiences violence and absurdity and, due to his inability to see, to imagine, instigates the film’s central, ironic sequence. The film depicts the main character’s sense of loss and wonder at the world and his subsequent feeling of desperation. Simultaneously, one can perceive in the character of the young woman an ability to see alternatives, to see the possibility of change in her life. This imagination and its necessity for…

  • Searching for My Mother’s Garden

    Partially shot in rural Czecho-Slovakia, this film investigates the phenomenon of no longer being rooted to a motherland, yet being tied to one’s origins.

  • simulacrum

    “Simulacrum” attempts to fashion the experience of absorbing plastic art through a time-based medium. Rather than voice-over documentary commentary, this short video authors an “Applebroogesque” environment. As in Applebroog’s constructs, surface indications wash over tensions that glue people to situations and each other. In “Simulacrum”, a family portrait becomes unhinged. Carefully tended family “secrets” get a night out on the town and the waiter gets more than the orders. Finally, the daughter’s embarrassment fractures into visions of Applebroog paintings, until her thoughts marry the artwork in a batle of imagery and emotions.

  • Sink or Swim

    Through a series of twenty-six short stories, a young girl recounts the events that shaped her childhood and formed her adult perceptions of fatherhood, family, work and play. The stories are told in a simple, direct manner, but are full of ambiguity, confused loyalties, and an apprehension of danger and loss. “I can think of no more corrosively moving refutation of the law of the father than Su Friedrich’s extraordinarily precise ‘Sink or Swim.’ Summoning her nerve, Friedrich rather fearlessly refines her previous researches into the unexplored area of memory, dream and desire.” – Ernest Larson Selected screenings: New York…

  • Somebody’s Kids

    “Somebody’s Kids” is a social documentary that shows three contrasting adolescents, each with a learning disability, their feelings toward the disability and their perceptions of their behaviour. It makes reference to three essential criteria which help to determine the success or failure of the child: the importance of recognizing the disability in the young child; appreciating the fact that each child learns individually; and the significance of family supports. “Somebody’s Kids” is not a technical diagnostic tool. Its aim is to stimulate discussion and to help parents, teachers, and adolescents understand how adolescents with learning disabilities feel.

  • Sweetblood

    “‘Sweetblood’’s chief elements include a flurry of family photos, a collage of Italian immigrant voices and a bottle of red. Expertly made, this memoir is Steve Sanguedolce’s hymn to his family, and his own secret history of the seventies.” – Toronto Festival of Festivals “Perhaps the most evocative short film in the program is Steve Sanguedolce’s ‘Sweetblood,’ which examines the strained relationship between the filmmaker and his emotionally detached father. A collage of family photographs and cryptic subtitles fills the screen while the voices of his family and his personal thoughts are heard. An emotionally stirring film in which the…

  • Tales of Tomorrow: Our Elders

    Alex’s wife has Alzheimer’s Disease and he lives with her in a Jewish home for the aged; Sarah has been in a wheelchair for 45 years and lives by herself – each has a different perspective on aging.

  • These Shoes Weren’t Made for Walking

    The filmmaker documents the lives of four women in his family, using their shoes as a common reference and as a springboard for thoughtful and provocative contemplations about their experiences. These four women (paternal grandmother, mother, paternal aunt, sister) recount and discuss the cultural and socio-economic forces that have shaped their lives. From the four-inch “golden lotus” embroidered silk sandals designed to fit my great-grandmother’s bound feet during the Ching Dynasty in Imperial China, to the tennis shoes and Italian leather pumps sported by my career-minded chartered accountant sister, the poignant stories behind their shoes are revealed. The film ends…

  • Big Deal, So What

    Set in the polyester 70s, “Big Deal, So What” is a deceptively simple look at the social dislocation of Rachel – a skeptical teen whose discontent sets the story in motion. Rachel leaves home and endures a number of subtle miscues, mild mishaps, and astrological misfortunes. Much to her chagrin, it is an unexpected gesture of goodwill from mother to daughter that brings her to the threshold of post-suburban independence. This is a playfully poignant film about what life is not supposed to be like.