Film Categories: Work about Women

  • Dance with Me

    The impressionist, lyrical style of the film is a departure for Nicolaou, who describes this film as “one half documentary and one half fictional narrative.” The film is a collage visually and thematically, though the narration serves to anchor the piece with a freestyle kind of story telling. Nicolaou drew upon experiences in her own life when creating the film. She incorporates footage from her family’s home movies of the 60s and 70s. “A haunting portrayal of the yearning for intimacy between parent and child.” – Henry Mietkiewicz, Toronto Star Life always appears to be more joyous in old home…

  • Purple Lipstick

    Purple is the colour of a fresh bruise. Haley’s latest videopoem, “Purple Lipstick” confronts the insidious nature of domestic violence through compelling juxtapositions. A disembodied female voice employs vivid language, absurdist against a backdrop of banality, images of “normal” family life. Numb in her isolation and still in her nurse’s uniform, a wife and mother prepares dinner. The inherent terror of her homelife is invoked with excruciating tension. Its brutality can only be alluded to.

  • Dying for the Pleasure

    “Dying for the Pleasure” is the result of a poem-as-script strategy. It is a darkly humorous, kaleidoscopic trip down Memory Lane, the audience witness to a woman’s anxiety surrounding the loss of our humanity after we “crawl inside,” to become enveloped, shielded, and cut off from others by a body of steel. Director: Katrin Bowen Writer, Producer: Heather Haley

  • Dandelions

    “Lyrical and full of mirth, this filmmaker wonders out loud in her first film: ‘How do I make myself at home in a landscape made foreign to me?’ Wilkinson looks at her self – black – and ponders in the white landscape called Canada how can she ‘enjoy the flowers’ as she cartwheels with great panache through fields of them. What kind of relationship to the land can she have in a place where she sees herself but where others constantly ask: Where are you from? Wilkinson’s existence vis a vis the land seems to lie somewhere in between the…

  • In the Dark (À l’ombre)

    A mother who has recently been incarcerated refuses to give up on her young son, no matter how fragile their connection may now be.

  • Occupant, The

    “The further away you go, the closer to home you get… It is true by way of geography…” Now that she has traveled land and sea, little Romny is about to meet the 360th degree of her trajectory. She reflects upon her journey and faces her duty to carry on.

  • ‘Yeah Whatever’ Girl, The

    “The ‘Yeah Whatever’ Girl” is a dramatic comedy delving into the romantic misadventures of Debbie – a cranky and bitter lesbian who has lost in love just one too many times. It is the eve of Gay Pride Day in Toronto as the film begins. In a humorously self-acknowledged homage to Dickens’ ‘A Christmas Carol’, Debbie’s recently deceased Grandmother has decided to intervene. Not only must Debbie mend her ways, but she must mend her heart. Over the course of the night, her Grandmother tells her, Debbie will be visited by three ghosts. And so the fun begins. First is…

  • Story of the Fish Girl, The

    “The Story of the Fish Girl” is a fantastical tale, told in the style of the silent cinema, about a young woman’s desire to escape her repressive existence, and discover independence and meaning in her life. Her transformation into a fish leads her on a journey of self-realization through the sewers of New York. Passive and naive, the fish girl swims without direction, unable to realize her goal of personal and spiritual fulfillment in the patriachal/animal world of the sewer system. The use of colour through hand-tinting techniques, superimposed over the B&W narrative, creates a visual space full of energy…

  • Folk Songs

    “This lyrical and impressionistic rumination on the filmmaker’s Bulgarian heritage explores the impact of family and tradition, the links between the old world and the new, and the simple, lovely gestures that unite generations.” – Hot Docs International Documentary Film Festival, Toronto In 1913, Sophia and Dimitry Makedonsky were teenagers when they left the Ukraine for the United States. Growing up in the Midwest, filmmaker LeAnn Erickson often heard stories of the “old country” her grandparents had left behind. As Erickson travels to Russia, the search for her sense of “place” sparks a re-examination of her family’s immigrant past. Her…

  • Secret Love

    A series of line drawings of a girl are inter-cut with black-and-white Japanese-inspired landscapes and textbook diagrams of electromagnetic waveforms, over which are animated organic materials such as star anise, lavender, poppy seeds, and cranberries. Created for the song by Flotilla.