Film Categories: Politics + Policy

  • It’s a Party!

    “It’s a Party!” was shot with a stationary camera facing the hallway and living room of a small apartment. Actors continually move in and out of the frame, while three sound units capture every word of deathless dialogue about those perennial party topics: art, politics, and sex. Chaos begins with the arrival of the first guest just as the hostess finishes washing her hair; subsequent guests crowd into any room but the living room, and a riotous conga line attempts to incorporate an irate neighbour. As the party winds down, some uninvited guests arrive and chaos reigns again.

  • January 15, 1991: Gulf War Diary

    “A personal register of the passing deadline, fashioned entirely in camera. Toward midnight, a trip to a demonstration at the U.S. consulate in Toronto vies for frame with the swirling super-impositions of clocks and newscasts.” – Pleasure Dome, “War and Cinema” program notes, January 15, 1991

  • Jesus Saves

    The political emotions of the butcher shop are discussed within the codes of Catholicism. Purging Catholic guilt, sins of the flesh, and flesh eating. The confessions of a butcher gone astray. An ambiguous layering of images, one is not sure whether the confessor is human or a pig, or if the priest is a butcher.

  • Jill Johnston: October 1975

    Jill Johnston is the author of “Marmalade Me,” “Gullible’s Travels,” “Lesbian Nation’,” and “Motherbound.” This cinema verité documentary is a portrait of Johnston at work and a feminist author at a transitional point in the women’s movement and in her own career.

  • John Dunsworth – The Candidate

    Ever wonder what it would be like to run for political office? Sure you have! Actor and theatre director John Dunsworth exercises his curiosity about the political process in this look at his life on the campaign trail during the 1988 Provincial election in Nova Scotia.

  • Journeys from Berlin/1971

    In “Journeys from Berlin/1971” there are five characters: a man, woman, and adolescent girl who “appear” only on the sound track; a female psychoanalytic patient in her early 50s; and a therapist, or analyst, played alternately by a man, woman, and nine-year-old boy. The speech of the analytic session is synchronous with the image. The voice-over of the other three people bears a constantly shifting relationship to a recurrent gamut of images: views from a moving train window and from various apartment windows in Berlin, London, and New York; tracking shots scanning a mantlepiece cluttered with objects; aerial views of…

  • Letter from Violet, A

    “A Letter from Violet” is dedicated to the memory of Violet McNaughton, a Saskatchewan woman who was instrumental in women getting the vote in the province in 1916. Violet saw the vote as a tool towards social reform rather than the ultimate goal. She lived by the motto “the welfare of each is the concern for all” and firmly believed in both the equality of the sexes and the need for men and women to work together. Part of “Five Feminist Minutes.”

  • Letters from Home

    Begun with a speech by Vito Russo, “Letters” enjoins a chorus of speakers to sound off on AIDS, love and death. Impelled with a variety of formal procedures, this series of mini-portraits are generously furbished with found footage extracts, hand-processed dilemmas, home movies, super-8 psychodramas, pixilated phantasms, intergalactic warfare and a hot kiss in a cool shower. “Mike Hoolboom has produced an absolutely sensational work, not only by the extreme density and intelligence of the witnesses who appear in the film, but also by the visual quality and inventiveness of his cinematographic language. Each shot, each edit has a message…

  • Mabou Fights Back

    When it came time to announce the closing of the Mabou post office in Cape Breton Island in Eastern Canada back in March of 1991, it was viewed as a “natural opportunity” by Canada Post. Here was a rural community servicing 1,000 residents whose post master had retired a few years ealier and had never been replaced. It was merely a matter of giving notice and assuming that a local store would be willing to take up the slack. It turned out that Mabou was not a typical rural community. There is a strong sense of heritage there, including the…

  • Man Who Envied Women, The

    Jack Deller, a professor of Foucauldian and Lacanian theory, is left by his artist-wife after four years of marriage. Deller is played by two actors; the wife is never seen. Her voice is heard throughout – it governs the film. The camera pursues him on the image track, while her voice pursues her train of thought. The structure of the film is elaborated in a constant interweaving of fiction and documentary, narrative and theory, amidst issues of sexuality, aging, power relations, and political activism.