Film Categories: Politics + Policy

  • Testosterone

    An animation to a Peter Kastner song mocking the darker side of MAN.

  • Cruel Rhythm

    Shot during the opening stages of the First Gulf War, Kerr’s “Cruel Rhythm” revisits the American desert for a cinematic tone poem in the vein of ‘The Last Days of Contrition’ A canopy of sound bites of media coverage on the build-up toward the war is juxtaposed with the alienness of windmills in the desert, and a startling sequence of drifting faces of a crowd coming towards the camera in slow motion. A thought-provoking piece on media’s construction of societal paranoia “Cruel Rhythm” is an attempt to make a public, shared feeling intimate, or conversely, to make a subjective feeling…

  • Confessions of a Compulsive Archivist

    Built from artifacts recovered from her own then her mother’s storage closet, “Confessions of a Compulsive Archivist” follows the filmmaker’s tragic-comic struggle to let go of a few things of obviously no use to her. Part found footage film, part camera-less video, it turns stuff that should have been thrown out long ago into a poignant study of the relationship between the creative imagination and our attachments, be they material or emotional. “[One of] about a dozen superlative selections by women, [and an example of] an intriguing crop of new video works examining the medium’s widespread, elemental function as a…

  • Cuentos de Mi Ninez (Tales from My Childhood)

    “In 1973, General Augusto Pinochet launched a violent coup in Chile that overthrew the Marxist elected president Salvador Allende. Thousands were killed, tortured, imprisoned, and exiled as a result. My family was among the many that were exiled in Canada.” – Francisca Duran In this experimental, autobiographical film, a young woman remembers and recounts difficult childhood memories of the 1973 coup in Chile when her family was forced into exile.

  • Shut Up Barbie

    The film is a reaction to the obsession a seven-year-old girl has with her many Barbie Dolls. The world of Barbie is pushed to its innocuous and tragic conclusions. Ann Knutson plays the role of the mother. “Shut Up Barbie” was pixilated in Tiburon, Ca.

  • Rock Pockets

    A short personal documentary disguised as meta-music video. A sugar rush of sex, politics and rock’n’roll as seen through the eyes of a ten year-old boy at the fair. Featuring appearances by members of Shout Out Out Out Out, The Wet Secrets, and the music of the Vertical Struts (r.i.p.). Awards: Inaugural Lindalee Tracey Award at the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Film Festival

  • Outsiders, The

    “A super-short Super 8 remake camps up the Coppola classic. An obsession of mine, and a lot of other girls, this movie touched my sense of belonging at a time when I felt I had none – teenagehood. Years later, when tomboy-ish has matured into gender-bending queerness, 21 grown ‘girls’ play at ‘boyhood’. Done DIY style, with an ‘unknown’ all-star cast of girls, this film embodies both a music video style of fast cuts and silent film intertitles – a post-post-modern experiment of complicity and resistance.” – Juliana Saragosa Selected screenings: London Lesbian & Gay Film Festival (London, UK), 2006;…

  • Role I Was Born To Play, The

    Using borrowed clips from three films about gender bending – two comedies and a tragedy – a personal gender landscape is created. This piece touches on the assumptions, strategies for survival and a the commitment to discussion that alternate gender expressions evoke.

  • Monsoon St., ‘77

    Monsoon St., ’77 tells the story of a day in the life of a young tomboy, Tina, who finds escapism in the rural desert of Arizona in 1977. To compensate for her unhappy surroundings, Tina lives in a rich imaginative world. She finds beauty in the natural landscape and comforts herself by summoning familiar figures from popular culture. These fantasies supply the happiness that is otherwise so lacking in her everyday life.

  • Sports Bra

    Exercise is failure in action. RM Vaughan and Shannon Cochrane try to be fit, sporty, and active people, but bad wigs and poor co-ordination always get in the way.