Film Categories: Resistance

  • Surviving Memory

    “Surviving Memory” is a film about the role of loss in the formation of identity. It is a narrative intercut with documentary fragments of political actions, which connect the various characters to event through collective memory. Through autobiographical spoken texts, the narrator relays fragments of a relationship between two Jewish women. The fragmented texts speak of the relation between these women as well as recounting various past and contemporary historical events of fascist and neo-Nazi activity (and resistance), Lesbian/Gay rights, Pro-Choice and AIDS demonstrations. While these instances tell a personal/political story about loss, they are also meant to elucidate the…

  • KAIN UND ABEL – eine Moritat | CAIN AND ABEL – A Moral

    We are shown how God sows the seeds of discord and divides mankind into good and evil. –What hast thou done? The voice of my brother’s blood is crying to you from the ground. “A queerly provocative retelling of the Bible story about a man’s bloodlust for his brother.” – MIX New York Lesbian & Gay Experimental Film & Video Festival, 1995 “‘Cain and Abel: A Moral’ (1994) retells the story of the Bible’s most notorious brothers, questioning the roles of discord and resistance (and featuring an extraordinary birth scene not to be missed!), all in a style that hovers…

  • Over a Small Cup of Coffee

    The poetic story of a young man’s struggle to pursue his life’s calling. Damiano is a young Italian American who, in the 1950s, works in his father’s cafe and longs to fulfill his dream of becoming an accomplished actor. By eavesdropping on the various amusing conversations of a diverse spectrum of characters who frequent the cafe, Damiano gains a unique insight on life – he learns that most people in society give up on their dreams by choosing to settle for what is easiest. His experiences in the cafe, along with the ongoing resistance Damiano faces from his father, eventually…

  • Green

    “My first foray into collage animation uses low-fi techniques, such as a photocopier, to illustrate a story in limerick form. The limericks tell of a place where creativity is suppressed and all acts of resistance are covered over with white paint. It also illustrates a character who displays an open sexuality, both queer and polyamorous. The DIY aesthetic calls up notions of subversion of the dominant culture through its ues of low-tech and hand-made traces.” – Juliana Saragosa Selected screenings: Splice This! Super 8 Film Festival, Toronto, 2004

  • Outsiders, The

    “A super-short Super 8 remake camps up the Coppola classic. An obsession of mine, and a lot of other girls, this movie touched my sense of belonging at a time when I felt I had none – teenagehood. Years later, when tomboy-ish has matured into gender-bending queerness, 21 grown ‘girls’ play at ‘boyhood’. Done DIY style, with an ‘unknown’ all-star cast of girls, this film embodies both a music video style of fast cuts and silent film intertitles – a post-post-modern experiment of complicity and resistance.” – Juliana Saragosa Selected screenings: London Lesbian & Gay Film Festival (London, UK), 2006;…

  • Films of Su Friedrich, The: Volume 1 – The Ties That Bind

    “The Ties That Bind” is a powerful meditation on political responsibility and personal loss as seen through the story of the filmmaker’s mother, who grew up in Nazi Germany. Using rare archival footage, extensive interviews and critical commentary, Friedrich constructs a fearless dialogue between past and present, between mother and daughter. “The Ties That Bind” engages in a profound search for an understanding of history, and challenges us in our responsibility for the present. Languages: English, German * New Directors/New Films, MoMA * “Le Mois du Film Documentaire,” France * “In and Out of the Cold, 1945 to 1995,” International…

  • unexplained as yet

    The vernacular of gender identity is ever growing and changing, yet many continue to live beyond these definitions, defying language and category; we are unknown, akin to mythical creatures. Multiple exposures of a single roll of Super 8 film allow a brief glimpse into the heart of this chimera: to be unidentified…unexplained.

  • SPANKIN

    An anagram of “napkins,” SPANKIN transposes the gay hanky code of the 70s onto contemporary coffee culture. Although humorous in content, SPANKIN is an allegory for hierarchical relations within minority groups, consumerist co-optation of identity, and the collective historical forgetting of repression and resistance. The older man has lived through it, the middle-aged man has heard about it and needs to look it up, while the young man is oblivious. Inspired by the criminalization of homosexual behaviour in Russia, India, Nigeria, and Uganda in 2013, SPANKIN revives the handkerchief code formulated during a similar period of suppression in North America…

  • ANCESTRIES

    An anagram of “resistance,” ANCESTRIES is a layered piece that encodes the dialectics of colonialism, de-sexualization, desire and resistance. An Asian is seduced by, and in turn, seduces a Caucasian whilst simultaneously reframing and performing two arias from Samson et Delilah by Camille Saint-Saëns. ANCESTRIES suggests possibilities for resistance vs. outright rejection by having the Asian turn the colonized culture against itself. At the same time, it brackets the Western de-sexualization and feminization of Asian males (and high voices), while simultaneously exemplifying and subverting the stereotypes of submission. The use of male bodies also calls out the worship of hard,…

  • Death Of A Bathhouse

    Combining footage from the final days of St. Marc’s Spa with interviews from Toronto artists Sky Gilbert, Keith Cole, Brad Fraser, Drasko Bogdanovic and Shane MacKinnon, The Reading Salon looks at one of Toronto’s longest running bathhouses through the lens of the artist.