Film Categories: Portraits

  • Poulet Poulet

    “Poulet Poulet” is a light-hearted sociological look at the many roles of poultry in human life. The emphasis is placed on the lesser-known aspects of human/chicken relationships. Writer and broadcaster Margaret Wisser discusses the evolution of the interaction between people and chickens, including their poor example as sexual role models. Members of the Feather Fancier display their prize-winning birds. Songs, toys and chickens round out this picture.

  • Pretending We Were Indians

    “This short animated film represents the recollections of a woman whose native ancestry was obscured by the social mores of the recent past. Tracing fragments of information as she walks, the woman speculates on what really happened to her ancestors and herself.” – Frances Leeming

  • Prison Art

    The son (and my Godson) of one of the Directors, Mr. Garegin Zakoyan, who is the founder and the General Manager of the Cenematheque Armenia, was imprisoned in 1994 on false charges. Trips to a prison became a routine for the family, and prompted us to make use of our access to otherwise forbidden domain of the penitentiary system. Thus the film was conceived. 90 percent of the narration is taken from the letters of my Godson and Sergey Paradjanov. (MB)

  • private patch of blue, a

    “I have breathed you in and there are no words to exorcise you from my soul.” – Eleanor Crow “An auto-portrait of maternity, ‘private patch’ shows Toronto filmer Tracy German quietly expectant, keening through winterludes of surprise before the birth of her first child. Episodically structured and materially assured, German’s exacting observational sense re-creates her domestic surround from the point of view of her boy-to-be, lurking over woodpiles and rock with eyes wide in wonder, turning the surrounding bush into a softly focused pastel glaze. “Deftly intercutting interiors and exteriors, ‘private’ opens on a wintry porch, a liminal architectural space…

  • Prologue: Infinite Obscure

    The film began with the idea of doing a “remake” of “Moby Dick” using the parts of the text that John Huston omitted from his version. A number of other issues began to take precedence however: the politics of the translation process; the relation of filmic to hieroglyphic writing; the possible intersections of (auto) biography and fiction; the articulation of (filmic) writing and (homo) sexuality. (MC)

  • Puamana

    Aloha! This gentle portrait of Auntie Irmgard Farden Aluli, one of Hawaii’s best-loved composers, focuses on Hawaiian women’s contributions to family structure, art, music and dance. An intimate glimpse into the real culture of the islands.

  • Quatuor de l’exil, Le

    This film tells us the story of four francophones, aged 17 to 19, who have come from the war-torn and hunger-ravaged country of Somalia. Having just arrived in Canada, they are searching for cultural reference points that allow them to reconstruct their universe. But the way they live marginalizes them and they do not always recognize themselves in modernity. How can they reconcile old and new, past and present, myth and reality? It is this quest for remembrance, identity and freedom which the filmmaker seeks to capture.

  • Rhythms of the Heart

    “Cinema weaned from the monogamy of sound and image in a film equal to one’s capacity for wonder… In ‘Rhythms of the Heart,’ Steve Sanguedolce’s affinity for expressionistic documentaries turns to the depiction of a ruined relationship. “Sanguedolce belongs to the Escarpment School- a loosely knit group of filmmakers born and raised along the craggy slopes of the Canadian shield. Their work typically joins memory and landscape in a documentary based production. Inheritors of the 19th century Lake poet romantics, ‘nature’ is typically figured as a metaphor for consciousness. ‘Rhythms of the Heart’ typifies many of these Escarpment School concerns…

  • Road Ended at the Beach, The

    In making this film I collected images and sound over six years of travel (not continuous) through Canada. Keeping daily both filmic and written records, I focused on people and places, my relationships to them, and the changes that occurred between each visit. I would collect these images freely: later to examine and make meaning of during the editing process. In this film I started to consciously pursue the relationship between a formal chronicle of events and my memory of those events. (PH) “The film is a series of ‘telling’ incidents in which events, which fall short of expectations, are…

  • Schizy

    “Schizy” is Barbara Hammer’s first film and is about her own coming-out process.