Film Categories: history

  • My Own Private Lower Post

    “My Own Private Lower Post” is the story of Duane Gastant’ Aucoin, a two-spirited Tlingit, as he seeks to understand how his mother’s trials at Lower Post Resident School have influenced his life. As she shares her story, he comes to understand how he too is a survivor. Haa Koosteeyi (Our Tlingit Way) is where mother and son find the strength to overcome and truly survive. “My Own Private Lower Post” won an Honourary Mention (runner-up) for best BC Short at the 2009 Vancouver Queer Film Festival. This groundbreaking video has been called “enjoyable, emotional and historic” (Whitehorse Star review).…

  • ON COLOR I: lukrezia

    References the nude subject of Lucretia in the allegorical work by German Renaissance painter Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472 – 1553). The distorted visual is juxtaposed with an orthodox choir of monks and the sound of funeral church bells.

  • Northland: Long Journey

    A film about environment, family and justice. “Northland: Long Journey” is an evocative meditation on filmmaker Edie Steiner’s quest for new truths regarding her father’s death from occupational illness three decades prior. The film revisits an early National Film Board of Canada film, where her mining father is posed as a heroic worker. He later died from exposures to workplace toxins, but his death was officially denied to be related to his work environment. A generation later, new scientific evidence amended the original legal and medical judgments, and the process of making the film became an appeal for justice. Filmed…

  • In the New World…

    Employing a rotoscope, IN THE NEW WORLD transcribes the film IN THE LAND OF WAR CANOES (1914) into a short “undated” version of a West Coast classic. 2nd Place, Community Arts Council of Greater Victoria Media Arts Award Selected Screenings: Ann Arbor Film Festival, 2010; Antimatter Underground Film Festival (Victoria, BC), 2009

  • Basin

    The forest and river awaken to a new day; the hum of the highway is constant. This is a boom town. An oil town. But what of it? An environmental scourge, or an economic miracle? … Just look. And listen. Selected Screenings: Hot Docs 2010 (Toronto, ON); Inside Out LGBT Festival, 2010 (Toronto, ON); Out on Screen, 2010 (Vancouver, BC)

  • For Cultural Purposes Only

    In an age dominated by the moving image, what would it feel like to never see an image of the place that you came from? The Palestinian Film Archive contained over 100 films showing the daily life and struggle of the Palestinian people. It was lost in the Israeli siege of Beirut in 1982. Here interviewees describe from memory key moments from the history of Palestinian cinema. These scenes are drawn and animated. Where film survives, the artist’s impressions are corroborated. This is a film about reconstruction and the idea that cinema is an expression of cultural identity – that…

  • Uncle Denis?

    Director Adrian Goycoolea looks back on the life of his great-uncle Denis Pratt, a.k.a. Quentin Crisp, the notorious artist, writer and raconteur. Interviews with the extended Pratt family, Super 8 footage, and letters and essays by Crisp reveal the dual personae of the man who penned “The Naked Civil Servant” and other literary works that unapologetically revealed his sexuality. “Uncle Denis?” is a fascinating personal portrait of one of the most significant queer icons of the 20th century.

  • B-Film Keeper, The

    A 1940’s damaged silent instructional filmshows good bee-keeping and film practice, while alluding to the nearing extinction of both 16mm film and honey bees.

  • LLOYD ____FEIN MUST DIE

    “LLOYD ____FEIN MUST DIE” is protest porn. Using appropriated imagery from the Internet and Sammy Davis Jr.’s classic signature song ” I’ve Gotta Be Me,” “LLOYD ____FEIN MUST DIE” is a choreographed sexual roundelay about the destructive greed and vanity of a vilified banker. Summoning an orgy of images to relieve anger sexually, the film’s cathartic Freudian release posits a retreat to private joy as a valid response for populations depressed by avaricious powerbrokers in capital economies.

  • Delphinium: A Childhood Portrait of Derek Jarman

    “Delphinium: A Childhood Portrait of Derek Jarman” is a stylized and lyrical coming-of-age portrait of Derek Jarman’s artistic, sexual, and political awakening in post-War England. Part biographical narrative, part experimental collage, part personal meditation on the most controversial and important modern British artist and activist, the film finds in Jarman’s childhood the stirrings of creative and individual epiphany that inspired a remarkable life. Written and directed by Matthew Mishory, the film was shot in Super 8 and HD by cinematographer Lili Wilde and features an original score by Arban and Steven Severin of Siouxsie and the Banshees and The Glove.…