Film Categories: Work by Women

  • Baba Bahram, Look at the Flowers

    Baba Bahram, Look at the Flowers is an experimental short film built from archival footage recorded in Tehran by the artist’s younger brother, Reza, at the age of seven. Holding the camera with playful authority, he roams through their family home, garden, and streets, capturing everyday moments with a sense of wonder and instinct. The footage is addressed directly to their grandfather, Baba Bahram, creating an improvised cinematic letter between generations. The film reflects on intergenerational bonds, memory, and the aesthetics of untrained seeing. Meaning emerges through gesture, movement, and relation. Weaving together personal history with a meditative observational form,…

  • Western Brook Pond

    A boat trip through Western Brook Pond, an ancient fjord in Newfoundland’s Long Range Mountains, carved out over millions of years by tectonic activity and glaciers. Western Brook Pond was shot on video and 16 mm film, which was hand processed with apples and coloured with turmeric and walnuts. Note: Contains strobe effects.

  • Epitaph

    Epitaph is an examination of site and memory. It follows the effects of plate tectonics on the landscape of Chile – the filmmaker’s birthplace – and the small and large cycles of destruction and rebuilding the ever-present earthquakes trigger. Filmed in both Chile and on the Tablelands in Canada, a site central to the modern understanding of plate tectonics, Epitaph incorporates eco-processed 16 mm footage, video, documents from public and private archives, and found footage to weave an epitaph to a home in the process of leaving the filmmaker, first as a result of exile and then to the gradual…

  • Sonnet (for the dear ones)

    A short film poem influenced by traditional sonnet structure and tone. Sonnet as elegy, a lament for the loss of close others whose deaths always arrive too soon. Presence and memory interwoven with grief, the transitoriness of daily life, the moments when the loved one appears in an imagined exchange.

  • Trajectories of Now

    Over an 18-month period, 18 racialized and gender diverse artists took part in creative research to develop artworks and activations responding to the guiding question “What change do you want to make with your art?”. Their work culminated in their group exhibit Trajectories of Now: An Anthology. Through visual, audio, and tactile works, Trajectories of Now documented critical narratives of relationships to identities; both personal and collective. In this short film, eight Trajectories artists discuss their artworks and processes for voicing, surfacing and amplifying creative advocacies and resistances for social change.

  • Home Was Never Like This

    Step-printed images of a “home” – a suburban house, no people in sight – combine with a children’s story, told in saccarine tones, about the country mouse who discovers that “there’s no place like home.” A gently told tale of alienation.

  • Honey Moccasin

    The first of its kind in Canada made by an Aboriginal filmmaker, “Honey Moccasin” is set on the fictional Grand Pine Indian Reservation (aka “Reservation X”) and employs a hybrid pastiche of styles that depicts the rivalry between two bars, the Smoking Moccasin and the Inukshuk Cafe, the tale of closeted drag queen/powwow clothing thief Zachery John (illy merasty), and the travails of the crusading investigator/storyteller Honey Moccasin (Tantoo Cardinal). An irreverent parody of familiar narrative strategies, “Honey Moccasin” forges an oppositional aesthetic via its reappropriation of the conventions of melodrama, performance art, cable access, and a “whodunit” style to…

  • How the Hell Are You?

    Based on a correspondence with a gay friend in the sixties, this collage film is a portrait of a person and a decade. Against a montage of found images, the narrator comments on life, love, and the American Dream.

  • Human on My Faithless Arm

    Winner of Honourable Mention (Experimental) at the 1987 Canadian Student Film Festival/Montreal International Film Festival, “Human on My Faithless Arm” shatters the common stereotype of the deaf. The main character, remaining nameless throughout, has rejected “the institution of the deaf” only to find herself, years later, rejected by society. In this multi-dimensional portrait of an individual trapped between self and self-image, issues of sexuality and economics are questioned. This film is an exploration of alienation through techniques of superimposition, sound displacement ,and deconstruction/reconstruction of language, exposing the hearing-impaired women’s comprehension of sound and conversation. “‘Human on My Faithless Arm’ is…

  • I Need a Man Like You

    “I Need a Man like You” is funny as it is provocative, and delivers a colourful and zany venue of Toronto’s finest Queen Street performers. Comedian Sheila Gostick is brilliant in her political satire and wildly hilarious as the dancing goddess. Performance artists the Clichettes bring a new awareness to rock culture through their original and unforgettable choreography to some of the great hits of the sixties. Helen Porter, as the killer Dyke in leather, shares a vision of the erotic that is tender, warm, and funny. The film is a timely and playful lampooning of some of the most…