Film Categories: history

  • Mathematics of a Lesbian Kiss

    Shot entirely on iPhones 5S and 5C, in this non-linear narrative two women contemplate the similarities between a lesbian bar in San Jose, Costa Rica and their experiences of the dyke bar scene in Toronto decades earlier.

  • The Grand Design

    Filmed in scrumptious outdated super 8, The Grand Design is a glimpse into the reflections of a dying burlesque performer. Vintage black and white clips from stag films of the 1950s are juxtaposed against a muted Tuscan landscape, the home and final resting place of the unnamed woman. The Grand Design is an unapologetic look back at an unconventional life, lived to its fullest, in an almost forgotten moment of pop culture.

  • Leftovers

    Norma and Virginia lived together in Chicago for almost fifty years. They died isolated, the vibrant lesbian community of their youth long gone; their tiny Chicago bungalow stuffed with objects – matchbook covers of bars where they had danced, paint-by-numbers left half done, bowling shirts Norma wore winning her many trophies, and over two thousand snapshots of lesbian life spanning four decades. An experimental documentary, Leftovers uses Norma and Virginia’s snapshots and objects to explore the unforeseen trajectory of lives lived at the margins. The film is a love story that poses a number of questions. How do we use…

  • Neither God Nor Santa Maria

    Since airplanes did not exist, people moved around using prayers, they went from one land to another and returned early, before dawn. In old audio recordings, the voices of pastors speak of the mythical existence of witches and their travels. In the daily life of a woman the magic of her tales begin to materialize as night falls. Night is the time when travel is possible.

  • Learning To Milk A Cow

    When the filmmaker’s grandmother was 19, she was taken from Soviet Ukraine to Germany to work on a Bavarian farm under National Socialism. She had the luck and perseverance to survive hardships of the forced famine in her homeland and forced labour in the new one. The stories of her everyday life – learning how to milk a cow, falling in love – are interspersed with three generations of reflections on politics, longing, feelings of displacement and loss. Hand-processed black & white film, colour film, photographs and official documents create a montage of different perspectives. The hand-touch aesthetic combines with…

  • Looking For Carmen

    “In his most ravishing and heartbreaking work, Arriaga ventures again to his native Peru in search of a lost friend. Along the way he encounters the faces of those who speak about wounds that cannot heal—survivors recounting the deaths and disappearances of their beloveds during Peru’s civil war that pitted the communists of The Shining Path against the government, with both sides aligned against the people. “The dead have called us to find them,” remarks Lida Flores de Huaman, and Marcos follows her evocation, cutting memory trails into Peru that bring back the names of the disappeared. Using frames that…

  • Occidente

    A film-poem of an ecology of sings that speak of a colonial history repeating itself. Subalterns become masters, antiques become reproducible dinner sets, exotic birds become luxury currency, exploration becomes extreme-sport-tourism, monuments become geo-data. A spherical voyage eastwards and westwards marking cycles of expansion in a struggle to find one’s place, one’s sitting around a table. “An ecology of signs lurking amid seductive 16mm travel footage echoes with post-colonial reverberations in Ana Vaz’s deceptively corrosive, award-winning Occidente. – ANDRÉA PICARD (TIFF, Wavelengths)

  • Derby and Groma

    While taking a stroll in Buenos Aires on his birthday several years ago, photo collector Pablo Cruz Aguirre came across an unusual gift. Blowing down the street towards him was a collection of letters, postcards and photos depicting a performing duo named Derby and Groma. This collection of artifacts contained a fragmented narrative of two people. Desolina Merlino, alias Derby, was born 1891 and of Italian descent. Samuel Salomón Gromatzky, alias Groma, was the son of Jewish immigrants in Argentina, born in 1895. Under the name of Derby and Groma, the two performed acrobatic dance routines in variety theaters throughout…

  • A Film, Reclaimed

    Produced with the support of Anna Sanders and École d’Arts Politiques (SPEAP) Paris. The ecologic crisis is a political, economic and social crisis. It is also cinematographic, as cinema coincides historically and in a critical and descriptive way with the development of the Anthropocene. A Film, Reclaimed is a conversation, an essay that reads the terrestrial crisis under the influence and with the help of the beautiful and terrible films which have accompanied it.

  • A Idade da Pedra

    A voyage into the far west of Brazil leads us to a monumental structure – petrified at the centre of the savannah. Inspired by the epic construction of the city of Brasília, the film uses this history to imagine it otherwise. Through the geological traces that lead us to this monument, the film unearths a history of exploration, prophecy and myth.