Film Categories: Work about Women

  • Films of Su Friedrich, The: Volume 4 – Hide and Seek

    “Hide and Seek” tells the story of Lou, a twelve-year-old girl coming to terms with her budding sexuality in the mid 1960s. Her bittersweet tale is skillfully interwoven with clips from a wide array of scientific and educational films, as well as interviews with adult lesbians who recount their adolescent attractions to girls, how they felt when they first heard the word lesbian, where they fit in the butch/femme continuum, and their thoughts about how they became baby dykes. “Hide and Seek” is for every woman who’s been to a slumber party and every man who wonders what went on…

  • Films of Su Friedrich, The: Volume 5 – The Odds of Recovery

    After a twenty-year period of multiple illnesses and injuries, Friedrich turns the camera on herself as a way to analyze her chances for a happier, healthier life. In the process, she captures the frustration, tedium and petty annoyances of a revolving-door relationship with the medical establishment, while portraying the complicated web of emotions that accompany any medical problem. With humor and honesty, “The Odds of Recovery” uses the filmmaker’s medical history as a means to address a perennial human problem: the desire to avoid conflict and deny the need for radical change. “…plays with the genre of the self-portrait…all in…

  • Broken Telephone

    A surreal short film in which a young woman ponders the relationship she has with her own identity.

  • Fallen Flags

    A layered tapestry of trains and underwater footage exploring the realms of fear death and transience, this film places the traces of human voices amidst the flickering light and shadows of empty passenger cars.

  • Desert Veils

    “Desert Veils” is a personal exploration of images of women filmed in the Chihuahua Desert of north-east Mexico. I was part of a film crew documenting the daily activities of an archeological dinosaur dig; when I wasn’t working with the film crew I was shooting my own images, looking beyond the disarticulated fossils and apparent structures, searching for what seemed elusive, hidden from me in my initial encounters with the women I met in Mexico. Given the cultural differences and structures that existed around me, my original images made me feel no closer to what I was seeing. It is…

  • Three Part Harmony: Composition in RGB #1

    This experimental dance film employs a bastardized version of the 1930s’ three-strip Technicolor process. Shot entirely on black-and-white film through colour filters, the images were recombined into full colour through optical printing techniques, one frame at a time. The gestures in this dance work explore the psychological fracturing and reunification in representations of the female body.

  • Knowledge of Good and Evil

    “Knowledge of Good and Evil” is an abstract exploration of the tension surrounding women and stereotypical representations of their knowledge. This film was created from footage shot at Phil Hoffman’s independent imaging retreat (aka “the film farm”) in Ontario as well as from footage shot in Vancouver (where I had given myself the challenge of shooting 100 feet of film every month). All of the footage was hand-processed, and some of it was contact printed by hand and treated in baths of potassium ferricyanide. The final film was created through various optical printing techniques.

  • 16mm Postcard

    A diaristic film in which the filmmaker comes to terms with her new life in Vancouver, “16mm Postcard” is a bittersweet letter back home to the Atlantic Filmmakers Cooperative in Halifax. Like in any letter, it becomes painfully obvious that one can never fully communicate, and the result is a series of random tidbits that point to a larger experience.

  • Playing Jacob

    Loosely exploring the historical weight of institutionalized religion in a postmillennial society, and its relationship to individual spirituality, the filmmaker places herself into the Jacob myth on the Pentateuch. She plays the role of Jacob in an attempt to come to terms with her religious upbringing, and her anxious ambivalence towards her own agnosticism. Inspired by the in-camera techniques of the early cinema of Meliese, the film and all of its special effects were shot and edited entirely in-camera in one take.

  • Dialogue with Vision: The Art of Spring Hurlburt and Judith Schwarz, A

    An innovative half-hour film featuring two contemporary Canadian women artists at work. Spring Hurlbut and Judith Schwarz have exhibited their large site-specific sculptures throughout the world. The film gives the viewer a unique opportunity to examine the often intangible creative process which an artist explores on the way to completing a work of art. No ordinary documentary, compelling visuals and a haunting soundtrack make “A Dialogue with Vision” a pleasure for all.