Film Categories: Literature

  • Kaleidoscope

    Kaleidoscope explores depression in an otherwise vibrant life. It is an original film poem edited to 16mm hand-processed B&W film that has been manipulated through tinting, toning and other cameraless techniques to reflect the fluctuations of living with a mood disorder. Footage collected during the Film for Artists and Film Farm residencies in 2016.

  • Exilic Trilogy

    “Exilic Trilogy” consists of three arthouse docudrama films from Arsalan Baraheni, the exiled Iranian-Canadian filmmaker based in Toronto. The films present a well known musician, a painter and a poet. The films are biographical, poetic and musical, colliding with social, political and philosophical manifestations. The first film is called “Light and Sound”, starring Soleyman Vaseghi, a well known Iranian musician who was forced to leave Iran after the 1979 revolution when music got banned by the regime. The film is about the light within the mind of the artist and the sound which he produces through his music in exile.…

  • Contents under Pressure

    An anxious young party-goer finds love at a party, but after committing a party faux pas, is destroyed in a washing machine accident. From here, the project pivots, self-conscious and needing to recast its hero, who quickly has an existential crisis (“what’s my motivation?”). A poetic, quirky, singular meditation on identity and personal history, populated with the beautiful vistas of Atlantic Canada.

  • Inferno

    Dante’s fantasy of hell, and his yearning after the Epic Poetry form of Virgil, the Latin poet and the magnificent illustrations of Gustav Dore (the actual inspiration for the film). Presented on each of the 76 illustrated first edition plates, a fast-moving condensed version of Inferno takes place, with a voice speaking the appropriate lines of Dante, according to the Lawrence Grant White English translation.

  • The Alicorn

    The film takes the form of a three-tiered hallucination: a dream within a dream within a dream. A pharaoh time travels from the future to ancient Egypt and dreams of a medieval tavern where people are suffering from the Black Plague. In the tavern, on the brink of death, an old crone tells her life story. The woman’s story, narrated in old English song, alludes to her salvation by the appearance of an alicorn borne by her younger sister. Themes of women’s stories, power, and transgression are woven throughout the narrative.

  • Satan

    Satan is sleeping with your next door neighbour. A film that examines the growing sense of something awful about to happen, and the helplessness of preventing it. Inspired by the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq. Satan was created as a collaboration between filmmaker Lisa Morse, and poet and writer Dan Walsh, through the Atlantic Filmmakers Co-op program, A Certain Openness: the filming of poetry.

  • Elizabeth Smart: On the Side of the Angels

    This compelling film profile of Canadian writer Elizabeth Smart uses archival material, interviews with family and friends, readings and dramatic re-creations to portray a writer who was mythologized in her own lifetime. Elizabeth Smart died in England in 1986, at the age of 72. She is best known for her novel “By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept,” published in 1945, a story of passion and obsession inspired by her love affair with the English poet George Barker. The years subsequent to that dramatic period – the complex relationship she developed with Baker, the period of literary exile…

  • Living Poetry with Rick Patrick

    A concise exploration of how life informs poetry. Rick Patrick had a difficult childhood, growing up with an abusive father. He matured into adulthood with some anger about the world and found redemption by writing poetry, persisted through numerous rejections and finally got published.

  • 1857 (Fool’s Gold)

    Four types of visual forms appear in this film: photographed scenes, written texts, mathematical symbols and numerals. The course of the film is charted by the transformations which these images undergo. The film has a narrative form, but… one that is developed purely in terms of the manipulation of the colour characteristics of the images. The texts included in the film are drawn from Ezra Pound’s “Cantos.” They serve, in the first place, to involve the spectator in the process of reading. Furthermore, Pound’s text is ideal for exploring fairly completely the range of relations that can exist between image…

  • Lamúria (Lament)

    Bruno is assigned the task of composing a poem for his literature class. The construction of his verses runs through a journey of self-investigation in an attempt to declare his feelings for his teacher. Portuguese with English subtitles