Film Categories: Portraits

  • House Movie

    “House Movie” is a direct autobiography, with events interpreted as they were in progress. It is about living intimately with another person, in a rented house which never becomes home, due to an unavoidable separation. At times the camera almost takes the point of view of the architecture, as witness to the kind of transient emotions common to houses like this. Using a Rachmaninoff excerpt, the film is edited symphonically, with theme and subordinate theme, development and re-capitulation, echoed in the recurring visual motifs and rhythmic cutting. “The extravagant camera movement that marks ‘House Movie’ is not so much lyrical…

  • How To: Festoon

    “How To: Festoon” is where my life as a filmmaker intersects with my job as a conveyor belt salesman. Three years ago, financial need and family obligation forced me to work in my family business – selling conveyor belts. Just as each of us is comprised of many different layers of experiences, “How To: Festoon” is comprised of two layers of film that form my identity. The first layer is a structurally organized account of a Limestone Quarry in which rock from a cliff is collected by a huge tractor and dump truck and processed into small pebbles on a…

  • I, a Dog

    An autobiographical film ballad about dodging dog dung in New York City while dreaming of Prince Edward Island. “A hit with audience and jury…an absurd, irreverent report on canine pets and their owners (or vice versa)… Hancox’s spiky sense of humour was well received.” – Martin Melina, Montreal Star

  • I.E.

    “I.E.” is composed of a series of themes and variations involving the interaction of camera and filmmaker. There is a predominance of in-camera animation, and the resultant distortions and manipulations both reveal and conceal the process of the film’s making. “I.E.” deals with illusion, although there is no doubt that it verges on the autobiographical. What we see is the filmmaker inthe act of making the film, that is, we see the taces of this process, insofar as the procedures used are capable of transmitting them. The figures in the film finally lose their abstract value and become vehicles for…

  • In the Alcove, at the Place

    For “In the Alcove, at the Place” Davis went back to the alcove (a private place in her room) and the place (the four corners of an intersection in Toronto, consisting of a house, two grocery stories, and a coin wash) every couple of weeks for nine months. In her alcove she filmed herself sitting in a chair; at the place she filmed aspects of its everyday life, making discoveries about it and becoming friendly with some of its inhabitants. In both alcove and place, there is change but also repetition. Among other things, the film concerns her growing familiarity…

  • Introducing Elwy

    A silent “talking heads” film. Elwy Yost as a purely physical presence as he talks to the camera, often in extreme close-up.

  • Iskowitz

    “Iskowitz” is a rare and intimate view of the life of the late Canadian painter Gershon Iskowitz. Born in 1921, in Kielce, Poland, Iskowitz began painting in 1941. At a time when most young men are exploring the world and discovering themselves, he was interned in the Nazi concentration camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald. To preserve his sanity he continued to paint, bribing guards for the coffee grounds he then used to create his ink. When the camp was liberated at the end of the war, Iskowitz retrieved his artwork, which had survived by being stashed under floorboards. It took…

  • Jardin (du Paradis) the Garden, Le

    “‘Le Jardin’ works through a number of experimental film ‘genres.’ It contains elements of the structural film, diary, autobiography, and the new narrative. It presents the viewer with a simple through-line (story), but its means are at tangent to the core of the film’s incidents. Apparently arbitrary choices of sound and image elements later resolve into a strong, effective coincidence – only to dissolve as the film moves forward. The arbitrary becoming meaningful might well be the theme of ‘Le Jardin.’” – P. Chapman, Opsis “Le film se veut une reflexion sur la vie et la mort. C’est une longue…

  • Julie: Old Time Tales of the Blue Ridge

    80-year-old Julie Lyon, sister of Old Time fiddler Tommy Jarrell, lights up this gem of a film as she spins tales of her Appalachian childhood in North Carolina – and her first romance.

  • Leftovers

    In “Leftovers”, Janine Fung’s wild narration about misunderstandings in her traditional Chinese family plays over images of her mother carving turkey. Also available on QUEERS ON THE VERGE.