Film Categories: Politics + Policy

  • STILLE STADT

    STILLE STADT (trans. Silent City) depicts the state of contemporary urbanity through an Everyman on the verge of a mid-life crisis, who goes through his life of routine both stricken and sustained by opera arias, that stand in for his thoughts and emotions that only he (and the audience) can hear. STILLE STADT in an allegory of modern existence that blends the real with surreal to explore how urban dwellers lose their connection with the environment, people, and praxis; and the suppression and containment of those lost connections by consumerism, distraction, and interiorization. STILLE STADT is an update and inversion…

  • In the Hollow

    In May 1988, girlfriends Claudia Brenner and Rebecca Wight were attacked while hiking the Appalachian Trail by a ‘mountain man’ named Stephen Roy Carr. IN THE HOLLOW tells the story of the shooting, Wight’s death, and Brenner’s desperate survival (and later transformation into an advocate for hate crime legislation in the U.S.) as she returns to the trail for the first time since the shooting.  The film combines documentary and narrative film elements, using the actual locations on the trail and dramatizations written by Claudia Brenner and director/screenwriter Austin Bunn based on her testimony. The film follows Brenner as she…

  • Take it apart and put together again

    Take it apart and put together again is an experimental film about the start of the Swedish Chopper club called Sofia Hogs, founded in 1968 at Söder in Stockholm. The club was inspired by the Flower Power Movement and the film Easy Rider. The film draws from an inside personal perspective, childhood, reflections, memories and photographs from several family photo albums. Linus Winstam aka DJ Bruce Leenus, creator of the film’s sound collage, is also the son of the one of the persons who speaks in the film. The film is supported by The Swedish Arts Grants Committee

  • Mixed Signals

    A scrambled satellite signal sets the tone for the mixed messages of fundamentalism and politics. A digitally scrambled broadcast, blurs televised images into a kaleidoscope of sound and color, starkly portraying the co-option of religious dogma for profit and political gain.

  • House Dress #1-5

    Five short dance works by a senior dance artist. An exploration of the body in mid-life and confined spaces.

  • Eye of the Mask

    “Eye of the Mask” reveals for Canadian audiences another view of life in Nicaragua. Set against the backdrop of the 1979 Sandinista revolution and the continuing contra attacks, many Nicaraguans were involved in the resurgence of popular theatre. It’s theatre based on both folkloric and experimental techniques. Judith Doyle and her crew focus on one of the most exciting and important of these theatre groups – Nixtayolero (Dawn Star) and its director, Alan Bolt. The film follows Nixtayolero as they travel to perform in remote, rural areas. Their work, and the response of their audiences, is juxtaposed with film of…

  • Neither God Nor Santa Maria

    Since airplanes did not exist, people moved around using prayers, they went from one land to another and returned early, before dawn. In old audio recordings, the voices of pastors speak of the mythical existence of witches and their travels. In the daily life of a woman the magic of her tales begin to materialize as night falls. Night is the time when travel is possible.

  • Learning To Milk A Cow

    When the filmmaker’s grandmother was 19, she was taken from Soviet Ukraine to Germany to work on a Bavarian farm under National Socialism. She had the luck and perseverance to survive hardships of the forced famine in her homeland and forced labour in the new one. The stories of her everyday life – learning how to milk a cow, falling in love – are interspersed with three generations of reflections on politics, longing, feelings of displacement and loss. Hand-processed black & white film, colour film, photographs and official documents create a montage of different perspectives. The hand-touch aesthetic combines with…

  • Looking For Carmen

    “In his most ravishing and heartbreaking work, Arriaga ventures again to his native Peru in search of a lost friend. Along the way he encounters the faces of those who speak about wounds that cannot heal—survivors recounting the deaths and disappearances of their beloveds during Peru’s civil war that pitted the communists of The Shining Path against the government, with both sides aligned against the people. “The dead have called us to find them,” remarks Lida Flores de Huaman, and Marcos follows her evocation, cutting memory trails into Peru that bring back the names of the disappeared. Using frames that…

  • Occidente

    A film-poem of an ecology of sings that speak of a colonial history repeating itself. Subalterns become masters, antiques become reproducible dinner sets, exotic birds become luxury currency, exploration becomes extreme-sport-tourism, monuments become geo-data. A spherical voyage eastwards and westwards marking cycles of expansion in a struggle to find one’s place, one’s sitting around a table. “An ecology of signs lurking amid seductive 16mm travel footage echoes with post-colonial reverberations in Ana Vaz’s deceptively corrosive, award-winning Occidente. – ANDRÉA PICARD (TIFF, Wavelengths)