Film Categories: Literary/theatre

  • Dishes

    measuring time in coffee spoons created as a part of the Ladies Film Bee with Helen Hill

  • Ever Present Going Past

    Filmmaker Philip Hoffman and poet Gerry Shikatani combine to make a cine-poem about the making of gardens, films and poems. Excerpts from Shikatani’s `First Book, Three Gardens of Andalucia’.

  • All Fall Down

    “All Fall Down” is an experimental documentary that takes as its starting point a nineteenth century farmhouse in Southern Ontario, Canada, and asks the question “what has been here before?” The film weaves together a complex temporal structure that juxtaposes the lives of two figures, one historical (Nahneebahweequa: a nineteenth century aboriginal woman and land rights activist) and the other contemporary (an ex-pat drifter and father of the filmmaker’s step-daughter) across two hundred years. “All Fall Down” explores these characters through a variety of archival materials: diaries, landscape paintings, photographs, heritage films, poems, phone messages, maps, historical reenactments, songs) that…

  • irma Vep

    Mad pursuit for the wild life leads to an outrageously messy story about a cover girl who encounters dangerous magazine cut-outs. irmaVep / Stars the bride of quietness / In a flowery tale, / Who will transform thy shape, / Leaving behind unanswered questions: / What maidens loath? / What mad pursuit? / What struggle to escape? / What wild ecstasy? Selected Screenings: Toronto Reel Asian Film Festival, 2009 (Toronto, Canada); Cucalorus Festival, 2009 (Wilmington, NC)

  • Sniffing Glue?

  • Longing, The

  • Men Together

    RM Vaughan’s love poem of men and their night world of camaraderie is bathed in vivid colours, evocations of the empathy men have for one another, presented with the virile yet sentimental music of the Chinese violin.

  • Song of the Suicide’s Daughter

    Kaja Johnson was one of the few female beat poets who managed to become known to the general public. In this film, Johnson’s poem Song of the Suicide’s Daughter (1964) is articulated and reanimated using stills and animation. “I met Kay by accident in Athens and we talked a lot over coffee-we tried to start a little poetry magazine. She came back to San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury. I think she became a kind of street guru. This animation is based on a poem in her book. Very loose style: photos Xeroxed and hand-coloured, bits of coloured cels and a few drawings.”…

  • im sommer sitzen die alten (in summer they sit, the elderly)

    Prompted by the death of her grandmother, Magdalena, she visits Gertrud, her grandmother’s life partner. Gertrud gives Petra an old suitcase full of memorabilia. Petra, in an attempt to protect memories from fading, decides to make a filmic ode to the love Magdalena and Gertrud shared. Based on the poem “im sommer sitzen die alten” by Ulrike Almut Sandig. German with English subtitles

  • 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.