Film Categories: Politics + Policy

  • acrobat, the

    Inspired in part by a poem by Toronto poet Ryan Kamstra, “the acrobat” is a consideration of the relationship of gravity and politics – the beauty and necessity of rising up, but also, perhaps, the significance of allowing oneself to fall. If the force of gravity is in relation to both mass and proximity, how does the force of politics resonate across space and time?

  • Regard

    This short experimental film mirrors 21st century issues of social deconstruction in everday urban life. Produced in Toronto, during that summer of the London UK transit bombings, it echoes calls for solutions to a threatened, “Homeland” and the notion of security itself. “Regard” plays with impressions of cognizance, consciousness, witnessing, and surveillance in the metroplis, where the passage of human beings through industrialized urban space/time is obversed. Connotations of danger lurk in trains, buses, streetcars, subway/communter trains, and automobile traffic, while bicycles and pedestrains weave sinous paths through the city. A well-intentioned fabric of vulnerability emerges, its irony punctuated by…

  • Dark

    In this film, Winkler confronts the subject of the Australian aborigine through the intercutting of footage from a contemporary aborigine political demonstration with images of the past: cave drawings, the sacred Ayers Rock and the head of an old warrior. Through assertive zoom and pan shots of the rally, Winkler achieves a sense of extraordinary energy, of a generation of people coming out of oppression.

  • Tranzploitation

    “Tranzploitation” is a trans-comedy. A trannedy! Or perhaps just a hot tranny mess. The story follows Kaleb as he fights discrimination (the anti-trans fats police), exploits his new trans-man identity (hello cheaper haircuts!) and makes the personal decision to get the surgery he needs (Botox, of course). Don’t miss the cameo by Amy Ray of Indigo Girls fame!

  • Searching For Wallenberg

    Drawings and text bring to life a poem by Isa Milman. …..Someone named Vera is looking for Raoul Wallenberg; he was last seen in a Soviet prison, scratching into the stone wall. Isa was born in a DP camp in Europe; she now lives in Victoria and has published a second volume of poems.

  • Are You Norma?

    “Are You Norma?” is an experimental animation exploring fashion restrictions placed on the female body.

  • Safety

    From our disaster-proof Eastern cities – through vast, impenetrable grain fields – to the fortress shores of our Pacific Coast – America is finally safe.

  • Dark Sun; Bright Shade

    “Dark Sun; Bright Shade” is a one-hour dramatic film which explores the cultural, social and political fabrics between two gay Chinese men living under parallel traditions within the Chinese social structure. Through the unfolding of events following the 1989 T’ien An Men Square Massacre in Beijing, the film focuses on Paul, a young Chinese-Canadian artist, and Kai, a foreign student in exile from mainland China, as they confront the differences in their politics, sexuality, cultural upbringing and family relationships. As they are drawn closer together it becomes obvious that, for the many displaced Chinese around the world, there lies ahead…

  • Shit Storm

    Based on a notorious ‘art scandal’ from 2007, writer/artist RM Vaughan recounts how rich and powerful members of the art world turned on him when he wrote his true thoughts about the mundane work proffered by the so-called Vancouver School. Art doesn’t have to be pretty, but does the art world have to be so ugly?

  • Moose Jaw: There’s a Future in Our Past (DVD Release)

    Available for purchase in the CFMDC Shop: https://www.cfmdc.org/shop. “Appropriate to a context of Canadian de-confederation, MOOSE JAW is at once a statement of the filmmaker’s own maturation; a regionalist dirge on the fatality of economic dependency; an excavation of our ever-vanishing collective past; and the ironic deconstruction of all the above.” – Michael Dorland, Art Gallery of Ontario Moose Jaw was a frontier boom-town flourishing on the Canadian Pacific rail line forging Canada as a “Dominion” in the late 1800s. But as rail gave way to the jet age, Moose Jaw began to decline. Now, museums dot the landscape (along…