Film Categories: Urban

  • 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…

  • 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.

  • Cleveland: The Resurrected Arcade

    “The dreaming collective…through the arcades, communes with its own insides” – Walter Benjamin. A visit to the restored arcade in post-industrial Cleveland, the piece uses architectural footage and archival audio to explore the city’s repeated efforts in urban renewal.

  • The Forms of Utility

    A short film essay analyzing a landscape shaped by religion, capital, and war. The film blurs the line between memory and history, only to reveal their cyclicity. The focus of this work is the mistreatment of the modernist architecture of Zilina, a small town in Slovakia, built by a growing Jewish minority in the 1920s and 30s and by new settlers from rural areas in the 50s and 70s. Their tastes and ideologies have been visibly projected onto the town.

  • 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.

  • TRANS-LEITMOTIF: A Cinematic Portrait of Toronto + Hamilton

    Following in the tradition of iconic experimental cinema such as Dziga Vertov’s ‘Man With A Movie Camera’ and Godfrey Reggio’s ‘Koyaanisqatsi’, Trans-Leitmotif provides a visual landscape of Toronto and Hamilton at this point in their historical legacy. Drawing on broad themes such as architectural monumentality and formalism, social/historical identities and cultural/traditional extinction, this film is both personal and anthropological in its scope. Filmed over a two-year period, it studies these distinct cities primarily through the lens of a 16mm Bolex camera, lending them a visual archive and subsequently, an inspired aesthetic vision of time encapsulated. With a mesmerizing musical accompaniment…

  • Stripped

    Forget everything you heard and enter the world that many know of but know very little about. STRIPPED is the personal, untold story of Phylicia Carty, also known as Mz Lady Ice, whose life took her in the direction of becoming one of the most revolutionary urban exotic dancers in the Toronto adult entertainment industry. The enticing documentary showcases the struggles and triumphs that come with being a female stripper in a contemporary world that is now gaining mainstream acceptance. A multi-award winning short film, STRIPPED has received a total of 4 awards, 8 nominations and 3 official selections in…

  • Flâneurs – Street Rambles

    Between film projects and following the birth of his daughter, a Canadian in Paris (Matthew Lancit) must confront his slacker lifestyle and decide if there is something in it worth passing on to the next generation, or if he is better off getting a job. In search of the remaining traces of flâneurs (19th Century wanderers of Paris), he takes his daughter on a series of poetic strolls in which he assumes the role of a contemporary flâneur and crosses the path of people who help reveal the relevance of such a figure today. In the movement back and forth…

  • Lift Little Tokyo

    Maps and memories of Little Tokyo’s historical district of Los Angeles are uplifted via scotch tape transfers.

  • Fotdella

    Fotdella follows Ryan Baer, a Canadian street musician – influenced by San Francisco one-man-band legend Jesse Fuller – as he constructs instruments from salvaged junk and performs in markets, ragtag parades, beach towns and underground spaces. As it drifts from Lake Huron to Berlin, the film captures the solitudes and celebrations of nostalgic touring bands who recycle 20th century blues, jazz and folk cultures. Fotdella tinkers with intimate and surreal performances to present a world of hacksaws, tubas, washboards and song staged between a transnational present and an imagined past. Featuring rare archival footage of Jesse Fuller’s last public concert,…