Film Categories: Portraits

  • Pink Fairy, The

    A long process of experimentation with a variety of different filmmaking techniques while examining an evolving queer identity. The film shows an emergence of the Pink Fairy. Part femme, part tomboy, part fairy, the characters come together to subvert the idea of a fixed identity. Luminscent imagery is imprinted by hand using hand-processed colour footage, optically printing super8 to 16mm, 16mm to 16mm, negative to positive, video to film, and repeating motifs, to explore the intricacies of the celluloid medium. Audio emotes through random manipulations in a Brion Gysin-like cut-up technique.

  • Role I Was Born To Play, The

    Using borrowed clips from three films about gender bending – two comedies and a tragedy – a personal gender landscape is created. This piece touches on the assumptions, strategies for survival and a the commitment to discussion that alternate gender expressions evoke.

  • Parricide Sessions, The

    In a therapeutic cinematic session of sorts, a gay son introduces his ex-lovers to his father – while examining his own fascination with the father figure.

  • Monsoon St., ‘77

    Monsoon St., ’77 tells the story of a day in the life of a young tomboy, Tina, who finds escapism in the rural desert of Arizona in 1977. To compensate for her unhappy surroundings, Tina lives in a rich imaginative world. She finds beauty in the natural landscape and comforts herself by summoning familiar figures from popular culture. These fantasies supply the happiness that is otherwise so lacking in her everyday life.

  • Stages of Mourning

    Ritualised through performance to camera, “Stages of Mourning” is Pucill’s journey of bereavement. In as much as this is a meditation on coming to terms with loss, the film is an exploration of how our relationship with the dead is made different through film. The artist orders image fragments of her late lover and collaborator, Sandra Lahire. By trying to physically immerse herself into photographs and film footage or by restaging these, Pucill forms a continuous stream of a life of two lovers. Through this doubling and layering, illusions accumulate as if these were a product of a machine that…

  • Men’s Boutique

    “Men’s Boutique” contemplates what to do (and where to do it) as a gay man gets older.

  • Gigantic

    Through the voice of a travelling narrator, we are shown the world through the eyes of a young and seemingly mad vagabond who speaks of his adventures, dreams, and experiences throughout Toronto, New York, and eventually Argentina.

  • Tourist

    “Tourist” investigates the nature of spectator perception in an unfamiliar environment.

  • Sports Bra

    Exercise is failure in action. RM Vaughan and Shannon Cochrane try to be fit, sporty, and active people, but bad wigs and poor co-ordination always get in the way.

  • My Father’s Idea of Heaven

    Using found and manipulated Super 8 footage from his family archives, RM Vaughan explores his late father’s bizarre HAM radio hobby.