Film Categories: Oral Histories

  • Trans Lives Matter! Justice for Islan Nettles

    A powerful and intensely moving document of a community vigil for Islan Nettles, a transgender Womyn of Colour, concerning her spirit and life. Because the personal is political. Because the brutal and increasing attacks on Trans Womyn of Color are outrageous and their victimization causes outrage. Because healing and action tighten our fists and boom our voices. Islan’s murder was a hate crime, she was only 21. Her vigil was held at Jackie Robinson Park in Harlem, steps away from where she was murdered. This endeavour captured the love and support that the community brought to sustain each other and…

  • Death Of A Bathhouse

    Combining footage from the final days of St. Marc’s Spa with interviews from Toronto artists Sky Gilbert, Keith Cole, Brad Fraser, Drasko Bogdanovic and Shane MacKinnon, The Reading Salon looks at one of Toronto’s longest running bathhouses through the lens of the artist.

  • Man That Got Away, The

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

  • Between Two Cinemas Part 2

    For the past thirty years filmmaker/archivist Ross Lipman has cut a winding path between classic international cinema and the American avant-garde. In this riveting but completely unclassifiable work, he looks back at a life in the cinema and an indescribable divide at the heart of it. Part biography, part clip essay, part abstract painting, “Between Two Cinemas” integrates 4K restorations of his old films inside a new documentary/essay linking them. It uncovers previously unseen archival material on Stan Brakhage and Andrei Tarkovsky, and adds new collaborations with artists including visionary experimentalist Bruce Baillie, Jeanne Dielman cinematographer Babette Mangolte, Bela Tarr…

  • GIK:SKWOD: How I lost My Indian Name

    In this experimental short film, a Seneca filmmaker shares how he lost his Native American “Indian” name. BACKGROUND: This is storytelling told through narration, images and text. In “Gik:skwod,” the filmmaker made cuts according to his eye blinks. During his film studies at Syracuse University, he read an excerpt from Walter Murch’s “In the Blink of an Eye: A Perspective on Film Editing.” In the excerpt, Murch explains how we naturally edit what we see through our eye blinks. The filmmaker created “Gik:Skwod” by experimenting with Murch’s editing concept.

  • Dear Grandpa

    Using my grandfather’s old eight-millimetre film camera, I explore the deteriorating relationship I had with my grandfather during his final days after being diagnosed with cancer.

  • Audrey’s Beard

    “Audrey’s Beard” was shot on my beloved Bolex camera. The film was conceived as a time-lapse documentary film experiment with shots of this once butch dyke filmmaker’s beard growing in over a 21-day period in the early 1990’s. At the time it felt like it was a very transgressive act as an artist, transitioning gender, to grow the beard I had felt ashamed of for so many years, using my body to tell a story, coming to terms with the shame of being born Intersex in a creative and empowering way. Ten years later, in 2001, a potent voice over…

  • Misadventures of Pussy Boy Trilogy

    “Misadventures of Pussy Boy” is trilogy of short videos subtitled “First Love”, “Sick” and “First Period”, each video’s running time is approximately 6 minutes, all videos are animated in a fashion that is very much “do-it-yourself” aesthetic, as told from the point of view of a transgendered youth in rural Cape Breton. Each video was animated by hand, the backgrounds were created like theatre back drops, with the characters hand painted and cut out, performing each scene in front of the matching background for the scene. Camera work involved shooting each shot for 3-5 seconds and then manipulating the characters…

  • Porn Yesterday

    Queer people remember their first experiences with porn.

  • whirlwind romance

    Trying to workshop a modernist camera set-up experiment while being distracted by my assistant.