Film Categories: history

  • beth olem | house of the world

    two super 8 camera rolls capturing the beth olem cemetery in detroit on the site of GM’s “Poletown” plant, only open 4 hours per year.

  • By The Time We Got To Expo

    A meditative journey through Expo 67, re-visiting a significant moment in Canadian history using manipulated imagery taken from educational and documentary films. Footage has been re-worked using tints, toners and photochemical techniques to create a vibrant collision of colours, textures and forms.

  • Weaving with Spanish Threads: an Immigrant’s Tale

    In the early 20th century, tens of thousands of Spaniards were driven from their homeland by poverty. Several thousand went to Hawaii to work under contract in the pineapple and sugar cane plantations, and most of these settled permanently in California after their contract were up. Our documentary tells their story, a story reminiscent of that of many other immigrant groups from Europe. We focus on one specific immigrant, Francisco Pérez, 98 years old when we interviewed him. His interview is supplemented by interviews with descendants of other of the immigrants and by on-location footage from Spain, Gibraltar, Hawaii and…

  • Evolution: A Theme with Variations

    “Evolution: A Theme with Variations” is a journey through music and art from the Renaissance to the present. We hear and see a musical theme performed in stylized examples from six eras – Renaissance, Baroque, Classical, Romantic, French Impressionistic, and Twentieth Century – accompanied by images of art and architecture selected from works created in these eras. A final variation combines all the above styles as it retraces its path back to a Renaissance bacchanal or dance. Another facet of creation appears throughout the film: the musician and his/her instrument, often shot alone, surrounded by darkness, to symbolize that art…

  • Head Cleaner

    Hand-drawn and digital animation, analog video effects, re-photography and video feedback transform images issuing from an apparently malfunctioning machine. Materials and objects, in varying physical or mediated transfigurations, pervade each scene, as relics from one moment in a transformation from girlhood to womanhood. Tongue-in-cheek commentary on entertainment technology’s fraught relationship to individual agency and identity, and its role in the standardization of expression and behaviour, underlies a loosely suggested coming-of-age narrative.

  • Le Phare

    Unlike the Eiffel Tower or the Empire State Building, Montreal’s iconic urban landmark is horizontal and spectral, not vertical and solid. Le Phare is a filmic portrait of the Montreal’s nocturnal marker, a spinning beacon that has been raking four long beams of light across the city’s environs since 1972. The nightly presence of these intense, rotating rays is reassuring for many, and yet also oddly perplexing: the illuminating machine does not provide reconnoitering for aviation; it is not synched to act as a time-keeping device; nor does it commemorate a specific historic moment or personage. Indeed, the lights serve…

  • The European Rooms

    An unhurried camera glides by bedrooms, drawing rooms, dining rooms, and entrance halls filled with finely crafted furniture and carefully selected objets. While displaying a familiar world of privilege, class, and prestige, these well-appointed rooms appear in the film as inescapably uncanny and oneiric. A slow unraveling of cinematic, sonic and architectural space played out in real time, The European Rooms is as confounding as it is elucidatory.

  • In the Hollow

    In May 1988, girlfriends Claudia Brenner and Rebecca Wight were attacked while hiking the Appalachian Trail by a ‘mountain man’ named Stephen Roy Carr. IN THE HOLLOW tells the story of the shooting, Wight’s death, and Brenner’s desperate survival (and later transformation into an advocate for hate crime legislation in the U.S.) as she returns to the trail for the first time since the shooting.  The film combines documentary and narrative film elements, using the actual locations on the trail and dramatizations written by Claudia Brenner and director/screenwriter Austin Bunn based on her testimony. The film follows Brenner as she…

  • Morning Light

    An experimental documentary following the narrative of George Griffiths and his son, Blair, in the early 1980s. The film is a triptych made up of three unique short films, each roughly corresponding to a section of a book written by George’s widow, Margaret, which details the very same narrative.

  • Take it apart and put together again

    Take it apart and put together again is an experimental film about the start of the Swedish Chopper club called Sofia Hogs, founded in 1968 at Söder in Stockholm. The club was inspired by the Flower Power Movement and the film Easy Rider. The film draws from an inside personal perspective, childhood, reflections, memories and photographs from several family photo albums. Linus Winstam aka DJ Bruce Leenus, creator of the film’s sound collage, is also the son of the one of the persons who speaks in the film. The film is supported by The Swedish Arts Grants Committee