Film Categories: Sound Art + Music

  • Whatever Happened to Jackie Shane?

    Toronto, 1963. Jackie Shane – a black, queer, soul-singing, flamboyant Nashville-born, Toronto-based musician – had a hit song on the charts. The song was a sensation, and with the lyrics “Tell her that I’m happy, tell her that’s I’m gay; tell her I wouldn’t have it any other way”, it was also an underground gay anthem. But before being able to fully enjoy the fruits of this success, Jackie suddenly disappeared. Uncovering this forgotten piece of Toronto queer music history, artists Hortie and Reynolds recreate Jackie’s story using original shadow puppets, overhead animation and stop motion techniques. Follow Jackie through…

  • Meet Me Under the Clock

    “Meet Me Under the Clock” explores a little-known time in Toronto’s LGBTQ history when an underground Halloween tradition became an annual confrontation between an invisible gay community and a fascinated, often hateful public. “Meet Me Under the Clock” tells the story of Halloween at the St Charles Tavern, a Yonge Street gay bar, throughout the 1970s. Each year, thousands of straight spectators would gather to throw eggs and jeer at the men attending the bar’s annual drag party. This unknown Toronto history highlights the role that LGBTQ spaces play in providing sanctuary and community, the complicated relationship between the LGBTQ…

  • REBIRTH

    “A dance ritual which turns into recreation of the self.” Transformation is a dance ritual. With every move you are born again. With every little step, you cut the umbilical cord. With every turn, you create a new shell.

  • Reinventing the Unconventional: The Hearn Generating Station

    Nestled next to downtown Toronto looms the abandoned Hearn Generating Station. Thirty years after it was decommissioned, art director Jorn Weisbrodt envisioned an entire arts festival, Luminato, taking place in the Hearn. We hear about the challenges of reinventing such an unconventional space, from politics to the will of the Toronto people.

  • Fist Fight

    A frame-by-frame collage of everything imaginable. First shown in a New York production of K. Stockhausen’s Originale Track from these performances. “Breer…contemplates and manipulates ‘still’ images from his past in what is apparently a moving family album. Black-and-white photographs of his wife as a girl, of himself at his work table… are scrambled together with fragments of cartoons, a handwritten letter passing too fast to be legible, fingers, a bare foot, a mouse in a cartoon trying to turn on a lamp, and a real mouse falling through space – to isolate a few of the more striking images.” –…

  • Beat

    Caleb is a dancer. He’s also deaf. Caleb experiences music through feeling—and when he meets Thaddeus, a local musician, he begins to feel a lot. A mutual interest in music (and one another) brings the two young men together. Sometimes, love doesn’t have to be complicated.

  • Father Knows Father Best

    Utilizing damaged film loops and photograms, “Father Knows Father Best” plays off an old found-footage print of the American situation comedy to highlight a dysfunctional family paradigm. Malcolm Goldstein’s experimental violin soundings exploit the atonal dialogue.

  • JUNK

    It’s a musical! Two gay men, one younger, one considerably older, are offered the contents of a recently deceased man’s dilapidated house in exchange for cleaning it out…items they hope to sell at a Raleigh, NC flea market…only to find nothing there but a mountain of ghostly vintage pornography…and personal memorabilia. As they sort through this debris, discoveries are made…not only of this man but of themselves, their unusual relationship, a generational divide…and loss. “The most offbeat buddy film of 2019 and beyond (as well as a future classic of LGBTQ independent cinema)” – Jed Ryan – Lavender After DarkHi…

  • Cherry Cola

    After Ryan receives an abrupt message ending his two year relationship, he and his fellow drag sister, Nick, partake on a drunken adventure for resolution. Moving through the city with night as their fuel, both queens are forced to reflect on the life they live, and the people who can’t seem to keep up.

  • Twilight

    Exploring the relationship between sound and picture, this film is inspired by the two lights (twi-light) found inside of film projectors. The animation was created by applying both sound and picture directly onto 35mm film. After the soundtrack was created, each individual sound was assigned a specific shape and colour that repeats throughout the composition. Visual shapes were airbrushed and hand-painted onto orange mask (negative film), then printed positive for further manipulation by bleaching or scratching into the film’s emulsion before the final print copy was made. Sounds were made by drawing Spirograph moire patterns onto clear mylar sheets. The…