Film Categories: Portraits

  • Parenthesis

    A simple inadvertent sequence of a few unassuming moments ends up feeling somehow sad and somehow beautiful. How this happens is hard to say. It has something to do with the interplay between what we can and cannot see, the incidental tensions underlying each small moment, the figures forming and reforming on the side.

  • 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.

  • Two Unrelated Shots

    An ode to our imaginative and creative instincts, “Two Unrelated Shots” is simply the outcome of a need to make something.

  • Figure on the Ground, A

    A hand-tinted hand-processed film loop dances with an obsolete low-tech telecine transfer machine to the underscore of a filtered soundscape. A portrait of the filmmaker in several inferences at once, with a nod to a few of her influences.

  • Two Hummingbirds

    A beautifully understated work that creates an almost palpable sense of absence through a simple interplay of word and image.

  • Pictures of Things That Aren’t There

    “Pictures of Things That Aren’t There” is an anthology of six works loosely tied together by the circumstance of their making: all were initiated while Daniel was caring for her mother as she lived out her life with a disease that erodes the frontal and temporal lobes of the brain. Her mother’s illness is never more than peripherally addressed. Daniel attends instead to the unnoticed workings of the creative imagination – the capacity of mind she believed her mother had lost. They are small works, made for one person and offered to anyone else who cares to appreciate them. Aesthetic…

  • 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

  • Fascination

    “In order to take the next step (not forward or backwards, but only: to go on) it is often necessary (for me) to lean on a picture made by someone else, sometimes a word will do, a gesture, the look on a stranger’s face. Colin Campbell made the next step possible for me so I took up a video camera (his pictures were my company, and my camera accompanied his pictures). Between his images of the past and mine, Colin Campbell emerged as a Cold Warrior, as an artist who would fight the Cold War with stereo. Yes, a stereo…

  • They Dance Alone

    A look back on half my life ago, who I wanted to be. Love and longing – lost friendship, belonging, the fear of touch, a magical embrace, a spell to dispel. Hands become a moment of realization – an intense feeling like no other – you realize you love her, but can never have her.