Film Categories: Race + Ethnicity

  • Sweetblood

    “‘Sweetblood’’s chief elements include a flurry of family photos, a collage of Italian immigrant voices and a bottle of red. Expertly made, this memoir is Steve Sanguedolce’s hymn to his family, and his own secret history of the seventies.” – Toronto Festival of Festivals “Perhaps the most evocative short film in the program is Steve Sanguedolce’s ‘Sweetblood,’ which examines the strained relationship between the filmmaker and his emotionally detached father. A collage of family photographs and cryptic subtitles fills the screen while the voices of his family and his personal thoughts are heard. An emotionally stirring film in which the…

  • Tales of Tomorrow: Our Elders

    Alex’s wife has Alzheimer’s Disease and he lives with her in a Jewish home for the aged; Sarah has been in a wheelchair for 45 years and lives by herself – each has a different perspective on aging.

  • Tell Me What You Saw

    “After the success of his feature film ‘Masala,’ Srinivas Krishna returns to personal filmmaking with ‘Tell Me What You Saw’, a lush meditation on bucolic pleasures and a formally precise and emotionally engaging study of the properties of light.” – Toronto International Film Festival , 1994

  • Ten Cents a Dance (Parallax)

    “Parallax is the apparent change in position of an object resulting from the change in direction or position from which it is viewed.” Confusion, underlying meaning, and unspoken truths are often associated with the dialectic of sexual communication. Mingled with the intensity and unpredictability of a “one night stand,” they generate unique sensations – mixed emotion, risk, excitement. The film employs formal devices in a manner which is simple yet effective. Its subject matter – sexuality and communication – gains depth and poignancy through the artist’s decision to shoot the film’s three scenes for projection in a double-screen configuration, providing…

  • There, Try Alive…

    “There is a voice crying in the wilderness”, Catherine Clement and Hellen Cixous say, “the voice of the body dancing, laughing, shrieking, crying. Whose is it?” It is they say, “the voice of a woman, newborn and yet archaic, a voice of milk and blood, a voice silenced but savage.” Introduction of “The Newly Born Woman” by Hellen Cixous and Catherine Clement. This film is an experimental psychodrama in which a woman goes through an incredible inner journey in which all fear, confusion, desire and attempts are bound and conquered towards a better understanding of herself. The doors represent the…

  • These Shoes Weren’t Made for Walking

    The filmmaker documents the lives of four women in his family, using their shoes as a common reference and as a springboard for thoughtful and provocative contemplations about their experiences. These four women (paternal grandmother, mother, paternal aunt, sister) recount and discuss the cultural and socio-economic forces that have shaped their lives. From the four-inch “golden lotus” embroidered silk sandals designed to fit my great-grandmother’s bound feet during the Ching Dynasty in Imperial China, to the tennis shoes and Italian leather pumps sported by my career-minded chartered accountant sister, the poignant stories behind their shoes are revealed. The film ends…

  • Thick Lips Thin Lips

    A musical experimental film about racist and homophobic violence.

  • Things in Between

    “Things in Between” is a story about a wife, her husband, and his lover. The film invites viewers to share the self-discovery of two women: Betty, an East Indian, who has just left her husband Phil; and Betty’s girlfriend Cannes, a Chinese, who is secretly Phil’s lover. Caught between desire and friendship, they must now face painful choices…

  • Tough Bananas

    As many people know, a “banana” is slang for an acculturated Asian who is yellow on the outside but white on the inside. “Tough Bananas” is a film by Chinese Canadian director, Keith Lock, from a nihilistic script written by Andy Xu. The story is about the friendship between two fourteen-year-old boys that comes into existence and blossoms, but is ultimately destroyed by betrayal. Bob Lin and Ted Wang meet in their schoolyard on a fateful day when Bob is bullied by bigger boys. It is Ted who heroically comes to his rescue, and after that Bob and Ted become…

  • Trapline

    “Trapline” represents a new way of considering film as a vehicle of projected movement… The film is composed entirely of static camera shots. “Ellie Epp’s ‘Trapline’ (1976) maps another way out of structural film toward a cinema of delicate implication.” – Bart Testa, Canadian Encyclopedia “Several filmmakers continue to explore space and landscape on film…. Ellie Epp’s ‘Trapline’ (1976) is the most cooly beautiful of all: filmed in the Silchester Road Public Baths, London, it sets a sequence of geometrically organized shots, outwardly but gently alive with light changes, ripples and reflections, within the continuous, distantly reverberant sound space of…