Film Categories: history

  • Arrival, The

    In this satirical short, a close-knit community is rattled by an invasion of the queerest kind. Eyewitness accounts reveal the terror that has befallen the members of an Asian-American church, leaving them fragile and shaken. “The Arrival” is a hilarious take on LGBT issues that cleverly mixes fact and fiction.

  • Even if my hands were full of truths

    “Even if my hands were full of truths” is the third part of a series by the artist about the legacy of former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. This component is a mirror that contemplates how memory might or might not become history, using excerpts from now-declassified CIA correspondence and a photo-montage taken at the Museum of Human Rights and Memory in Santiago. Rotterdam International Film Festival, DINAMO: True/False, 2019

  • Happy Hour

    Set in a bar in 1960, two women share a look that launches a fantasy encounter. An homage to the women who had the courage to explore their sexuality in the mid 20th century, and a lament for those who could not. Set to the song, “Oh Regret” by singer/songwriter Mary Lorson.

  • Christ Church – Saint James

    In the spring of 1998, Christ Church – Saint James, a historic black church in Toronto’s Little Italy, was destroyed by arson. All that remained were walls and a pit, and over subsequent years, the site was overtaken with graffiti. This film has taken on the layered form of the site itself: the space and its surfaces becoming tangled and multiple, the grid of a stone-filled window giving geometric form to simultaneously occurring images of concrete, nature, waste, paint, and sky. Music by John Butcher.

  • Man That Got Away, The

    A musical documentary that tells the true life story of Trevor’s great-uncle Jimmy in six original songs.

  • My clothes were dragging me back

    In “My clothes were dragging me back”, I have continued to work with Delia Derbyshire’s radio show for the BBC: ”Inventions for Radio: Dreams” (1964). The stories, which are about being chased and awkward situations, are combined with found footage from a 1968 educational film about a school in Toronto that embraced various types of pedagogical practice. Short edits of children in different states of mind are repeated, like a pickup on a turntable stuck on a track. A superimposed image, a kaleidoscope moves quickly and serves as a white noise on these portraits.

  • Lecciones en Proceso (Lessons in Process)

    “Lessons in Process” is a poetic documentary about a film making workshop given by Canadian filmmaker Philip Hoffman at the famed Escuela Internacional de Cine y Televisión de San Antonio de los Baños in Cuba. Founded in 1986 by Argentinean poet and filmmaker Fernando Birri, Colombian writer Gabriel García Marquez and Cuban filmmakers Julio Garcia Espinosa, and Thomas Gutirres Alea, “the school of the three worlds” was established to give students from developing countries in Latin America and the Carribean, Africa and Asia, an opportunity to participate in the democracy of the image. Hoffman collaborates with the students to produce…

  • This Town of Toronto…

    This short film takes a rather unconventional approach to the city symphony genre, which often depicts the rhythms of the city from morning to night and relies on the symphonic composition of shots that, like in musical symphony, build through various movements until their final conclusion. This Town of Toronto… extends its temporal dimension past the span of one day to 108 years, by including some of the earliest motion picture documentations of Toronto: the Great Fire of 1904 and the traffic scene on Bay Street, including horse-drawn fire trucks and firemen rushing to extinguish the fire, all captured by…

  • Separation

    In Kneller’s film Separation (2008), the tranquil mood captured in a home movie becomes disturbed by its colors separating into rhythms of discontent. The un-synching or dismantling of the film’s colors reveals what the image is made of, namely, densities and layers of colored pigments. Kneller’s action points to a similar layering in the image content: the apparently happy holiday scenes being made up of layers of presumptions of what happiness is.

  • Fati et Aissatta (Fati and Aissatta)

    Fati, 23, and Aissatta, 16, live in the banlieue north of Paris, in a cité called “La Rose des Vents.” Their father emigrated from Mauritania to France 40 years ago to work on the assembly line at Citroën. Shot over a period of three years, the film follows the stories of the two sisters, their refusal of traditional ideas of French identity and their search for independence within a community where secularization, radicalization and patriarchal rule are continually in confrontation. Fati, 23 ans, et Aissatta, 16 ans, vivent dans la cité de La Rose des Vents, dans la banlieue nord…