Film Categories: Portraits

  • Moose Jaw: There’s a Future in Our Past

    “Appropriate to a context of Canadian de-confederation, “Moose Jaw” is at once a statement of the filmmaker’s own maturation; a regionalist dirge on the fatality of economic dependency; an excavation of our ever-vanishing collective past; and the ironic deconstruction of all the above.” – Michael Dorland, Art Gallery of Ontario Moose Jaw was a frontier boom-town flourishing on the Canadian Pacific rail line forging Canada as a “Dominion” in the late 1800s. But as rail gave way to the jet age, Moose Jaw began to decline. Now, museums dot the landscape (along with a giant moose), and schemes to restore…

  • Artist on Fire: The Work of Joyce Wieland

    Joyce Wieland was, for well over thirty years, one of Canada’s most exciting and innovative artists. She worked in virtually every artistic medium, including cloth works, pastels, coloured pencils, oils, bronze, watercolours, and films of all gauges. One of the founding group of what came to be known as structural filmmakers in New York in the late 60s, she was also one of the first artists of this century to break into women’s traditional crafts as an art form, and used both film and cloth works as platforms for her principal political subjects – ecology, Canadian nationalism, and feminism. This…

  • My Own Obsession

    “My Own Obsession” is a film interested in the implications of identity and the archeology of those mental layers that represent our identities. It is a journey through the identity of an Armenian-Canadian woman during a specific period, which is documented through interviews with various individuals about their encounters and experiences with the protagonist. The line between documentary and fiction is blurred. The cinematic impact unfolds into poetic visual metaphors, which weave themselves throughout the film. It is a film which explores the relationship of the viewer to the film. An unknown archivist/filmmaker structures the cinematic experience through the guise…

  • Name Change: A California Film

    Barbara Martineau became Sara Halprin and made this film to mark the change.

  • New View, New Eyes

    A rare combination of personal diary and travelogue, “New View, New Eyes” traces the filmmaker’s efforts to carve out her own identity, as she makes her first visit to her father’s homeland of India. The journey is an uncomfortable one, as she struggles with “western” preconceptions of India – poverty, beggars, disease – and realizes that she herself has come there as a stranger.

  • Nice Step to Take, A

    The radical change from an institutional residence to an apartment complex promoting independence sets the stage for this film about the people at Bellwoods Park House in Toronto. Founded in 1967 by the Adult Cerebral Palsy Institute, Bellwoods is one of the first residences for the disabled in North America. This film puts a face on people too often masked by our perception of disability. Produced for The Adult Cerebral Palsy Institute of Metro Toronto.

  • Now That We Are Persons

    Until 1929, Canadian women were told that they couldn’t be senators. Our Constitution, the British North American Act, (BNA) said that only qualified “persons” could be appointed. The government of the day understood that to mean men only. So, in 1927, five Albertan women challenged this definition of “persons” in court. On October 18, 1929, the British Privy Council, then the highest court of appeal in Canada, ruled that the word “persons” could include both men and women. With this new historical interpretation, women won the right to be eligible for the Canadian senate.

  • Nursing History

    “Nursing History” began as an inquiry into the nature of woman’s work, specifically the relationship between woman’s work as wives and mothers, and woman’s work as nurses. Having worked as a nurse for ten years, I decided to locate this inquiry historically, within my own past as represented in the home movies that, for the most part, my father had made and that stand as a record of our family’s collective history. From 1968-1984, 60 minutes worth of history, on Super 8 film, were recorded. Out of this footage there were forty minutes of weddings and in each case it…

  • On the Pond

    Essential to the making of the film was an examination of still photographs. Stills were used as clues to the past. Clues that would bring order and meaning to significant memories. (PH) “Hoffman’s film is in the experimental film tradition of the personal diary, although in this case a beautifully paced mixture of family photographs and dramatic reconstruction interwoven into a narrative creates an objective distance. ‘On the Pond’ reveals skills of editing, sound and story telling which evoke in ten minutes a complex and emotional study of a family, its past and present, its young dreams and its affections.…

  • Opus 1 No 1

    This film, in Sonata form, traces the development and final performance of a Beethoven chamber piece by a trio of very gifted young musicians.