Film Categories: Poverty

  • Soy un ser cuyas raíces // I am a being whose roots

    Soy un ser cuyas raíces // I am a being whose roots reworks Jacques Madvo’s Countries & People: Venezuela to explore labour and migration. Taking the final words of the film’s voice-over as a starting point, Soy un ser cuyas raíces // I am a being whose roots pairs Madvo’s film footage with a text-based conversation with young Venezuelan literature scholar and language teacher Angel Said Dominguez Pinto. Dominguez Pinto relocated to Panama in 2014 to make a living teaching English, Spanish & German in Panama City after Venezuela’s economic collapse. Over e-mail, we co-authored a conversational text, exploring migration,…

  • Midnight at the Continental

    Toronto, 1955. In the heart of Chinatown, a new bar opens: The Continental. It’s dark, grimy, and attracts an unusual clientele. Local tabloids scream in 20-point font: “Sapphos overflow Chinatown!” The bar becomes the meeting place for two of Toronto’s marginalized communities: Chinese-Canadian men and lesbians living “the life” full time. Recounting this forgotten piece of Toronto queer history, artists Hortie and Reynolds tell the story of Toronto’s first long-standing lesbian bar using original shadow puppets, overhead projector animation and archival images. Pull a stool up to the bar and watch lesbians and Chinese men stand side by side, battling…

  • Nachlass

    “Nachlass” is the German word for inheritance. It is also the word for posthumously published works. Most commonly, it is used to describe all the things, both the valuables and the junk, left behind in an apartment after its inhabitant has died. In Nachlass the everyday objects of a Ukrainian immigrant to Canada function as placeholders for all of the information that has gone missing between languages and cultures in the process of immigration. However, although this story at the turn of the century is one, which must operate beyond the realm of language, its continuation today in the Germany…

  • THE GENDER LADY: THE FABULOUS DR. MAY COHEN

    Roe v Wade and women’s abortion rights are under concerted attack in a number of American states. In Canada abortion has been legal for more than 30 years, but access to abortion services varies considerably across the country and conservative MPs and MLAs are increasingly participating in anti-choice strategy gatherings. Into this retrogressive context arrives a timely documentary: the compelling story of a courageous, pro-choice feminist campaigning Canadian family physician, “The Gender Lady – The Fabulous Dr May Cohen”. Dr. May Cohen has advocated for women’s health, women’s rights, abortion rights, LGBT rights and human sexuality for more than fifty…

  • The Shouting Flower

    A work about collaboration and process, “The Shouting Flower” approaches political resistance from multiple subject positions–plant, child, filmmaker–in an attempt to model what Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing calls “work across difference.” Using images processed in plant material that was gathered at key locations throughout the city, as well as direct animation and audio recorded on a child’s toy, the film documents its own creation within a landscape of hostility and neglect. A collaboration against cooperation, it becomes as it refuses. Refusing, dispersing, it shouts, “No!”

  • The Sweater

    Historian Carolyn Steedman, in writing about her own working-class childhood, describes how, for children of working-class families, it is often the mother and not the father who embodies power. The child experiences a father who is relatively powerless in the larger social world outside the home, so that even if he is physically powerful, as my father was, he can simultaneously be perceived as a weak man. “The Sweater” blends 16mm hand processed film with found footage and video to explore childhood memories triggered by finding the last thing my deceased father gave me. Using short vignettes, I tell several…

  • A Life on the Borderlands

    This is a film about my father, who immigrated to Montreal from Chile in the early 1970s after a hard-scrabble life on the streets of Santiago as a youth. Like my mother, who immigrated from Argentina around that time, his mobile life was characterised by neither chain migration nor lasting social ties with members of his ethnic group. His story is also a story about class, politics, and complicated histories of migration and exile.