Film Categories: film studies

  • Artist Spotlight Series: Gariné Torossian

    Available for purchase in the CFMDC Shop: https://www.cfmdc.org/shop. In her lush, intricately constructed works, Gariné Torossian explores film form, hybrid film and video technologies, and themes of belonging, identity and the body. “Mining a rich palette of colours and textures, superimpositions and dissolves, mixing formats of Super 8, 35mm and video, [she] creates films that bridge the gaps between visual art, sound art, cinema and the rock video” (Lux Distribution). Study guide includes an essay by Ian Balfour, York University. CLICK HERE to download study guide. 1) Visions 2) Girl from Moush 3) Drowning in Flames 4) Pomegranate Tree 5)…

  • Artist Spotlight Series: Steven Woloshen

    Available for purchase in the CFMDC Shop: https://www.cfmdc.org/shop. Steven Woloshen has mastered the art of direct animation in a series of explosively creative films. Straddling the terrain between the joyfully entertaining and conceptually rigourous, Woloshen’s virtuouso play with film’s most basic elements re-imagines the relationship between colour, sound and the moving image. Study guide includes an essay by Chris Gehman, independent writer & programmer. 1) Son of Dada (1982/Col/Snd/2.5 minutes) 2) Didre Novo (1983/Col/Snd/2.5 minutes) 3) Pepper Steak (1984/Col/Snd/3 minutes) 4) Get Happy (1999/Col/Snd/3.5 minutes) 5) MeMeMaMa (2000/Col/Snd/2 minutes) 6) Ditty Dot Comma (2001/Col/Snd/3 minutes) 7) The Babble on Palms…

  • Artist Spotlight Series: Roberto Ariganello

    Available for purchase in the CFMDC Shop: https://www.cfmdc.org/shop. Roberto Ariganello was a passionate believer in the importance of independent film. Working in a variety of styles and genres, he experimented with narrative and documentary form, playfully exploring the use of appropriated imagery and the relationship between sound and picture. His solo and collaborative films offer humorous and thoughtful alternatives to the conventions of mainstream media and consumer culture. Study guide includes an essay by James Missen. 1) Yesterday’s Wine 2) Shelter 3) Non-Zymase Pentathlon 4) Contrafacta 5) Loteria 6) Gesture

  • Missing Persons

  • Connecting Lines

    Four passengers trace a circular journey connecting Seattle, Los Angeles, New Orleans, Chicago, and back to Seattle again. The action in Connecting Lines takes place in the bar cars of these moving trains, where changing landscapes fill a single moving-picture window, as an eclectic mix of passengers come and go in the foreground. These passengers do the things people on trains usually do: smoke, drink, and tell stories. As characters appear, wander off, and reappear at random, their tales are reinvented and adapted to suit new audiences. All the while, the passing landscape is being shaped into patterns by the…

  • Discrete Moments

    A short experimental film, “Discrete Moments” offers some paradoxical thoughts on the mathematics of “forever and ever.” While a big jet plane crawls across the tarmac, a love held back, goes unnoticed. “Discrete Moments” was produced for the 1994 Cineworks omnibus film Breaking Up in 3 Minutes. Six Vancouver filmmakers were each given 200 feet of film, restricted to one day of shooting, three edits, one track of sound, and asked to make a three minute film about the break-up of a personal relationship.

  • This Time Last Year

    On Thanksgiving of 2001, Daniel set her video camera to run while she and her family got ready to pose for a photograph. One year later, she turns the footage, together with notes from the same time, into a portrait of all that is no longer there. “Daniel explores loss as something sensed, felt and lived with in this poetic portrait of the absences we feel in the moments we capture on film.” – Images Festival 2003

  • Parenthesis

    A simple inadvertent sequence of a few unassuming moments ends up feeling somehow sad and somehow beautiful. How this happens is hard to say. It has something to do with the interplay between what we can and cannot see, the incidental tensions underlying each small moment, the figures forming and reforming on the side.

  • Confessions of a Compulsive Archivist

    Built from artifacts recovered from her own then her mother’s storage closet, “Confessions of a Compulsive Archivist” follows the filmmaker’s tragic-comic struggle to let go of a few things of obviously no use to her. Part found footage film, part camera-less video, it turns stuff that should have been thrown out long ago into a poignant study of the relationship between the creative imagination and our attachments, be they material or emotional. “[One of] about a dozen superlative selections by women, [and an example of] an intriguing crop of new video works examining the medium’s widespread, elemental function as a…

  • Two Unrelated Shots

    An ode to our imaginative and creative instincts, “Two Unrelated Shots” is simply the outcome of a need to make something.