Film Categories: Work by Women

  • January 15, 1991: Gulf War Diary

    “A personal register of the passing deadline, fashioned entirely in camera. Toward midnight, a trip to a demonstration at the U.S. consulate in Toronto vies for frame with the swirling super-impositions of clocks and newscasts.” – Pleasure Dome, “War and Cinema” program notes, January 15, 1991

  • Jimmy Brown the Newsboy

    This visual poem for children utilizes silhouette paper doll cut-outs and characters to follow a young boy and his pet frog on an early morning paper route. The characters dance in time to the music, a traditional American folk tune, from which the film takes its title.

  • Journeys from Berlin/1971

    In “Journeys from Berlin/1971” there are five characters: a man, woman, and adolescent girl who “appear” only on the sound track; a female psychoanalytic patient in her early 50s; and a therapist, or analyst, played alternately by a man, woman, and nine-year-old boy. The speech of the analytic session is synchronous with the image. The voice-over of the other three people bears a constantly shifting relationship to a recurrent gamut of images: views from a moving train window and from various apartment windows in Berlin, London, and New York; tracking shots scanning a mantlepiece cluttered with objects; aerial views of…

  • Just Before the Dawn

    Whether you’re in Honduras or in California, the symbols of the good life are the same… Coca-Cola, lottery tickets, and designer jeans… the difference is that in Honduras, most people can’t afford to buy. To combat the desperate poverty, the women of Honduras have started to organize. “Just Before the Dawn” focuses on three groups of women in rural Honduras who are discovering they can effect changes they never even dreamed of.

  • Keltie’s Beard: A Woman’s Story

    Before Keltie came along, the women in her family removed their facial hair and told no one. Keltie is proud of her beard and tells her story to us in this single-take film.

  • Kisses

    “Betty Ferguson’s ‘Kisses’, an hour-long anthology of film clips presented without titles or voiceover, is the sweetest and, in avant-garde terms, the most conventional film on the program. Although the kiss reached its supreme expression as the on-screen replacement for copulation in post-Code Hollywood, Ferguson’s material is drawn largely from silent classics and the less-fetishized European cinema of around 1960. She compares her film to a patchwork quilt, but it’s basically morphological, cataloguing clusters of shots where kisses are delivered to the hand, the neck, rained down on a beloved face, perfunctorily bestowed on a spouse, awarded to dogs, dolls,…

  • Lac La Croix

    Native people young and old speak about land issues, the environment, and the culture and history of Lac La Croix Ojibway peoples of northwestern Ontario. The film examines issues such as the community ban on liquor, the fight against welfare dependency, and the effects of the media on young people. “Lac La Croix” was made with the full cooperation of the Lac La Croix community. In the film, many different people speak about their lives and their current political struggles. This is a film about a Native community fighting successfully for survival, blending the old and the new.

  • Law Is in the Seed, The

    “The Law Is in the Seed” is a video of a poem by the same name written by Alex Jacobs, a Mohawk Indian poet from Akwesasne (New York State). The poem is about the Native American concept of democracy as contained in the Great Law, an oral document which originated with Deganawida, the Huron co-founder of the Iroquois Confederacy. The Great Law was the model for the United States Constitution. As Jacobs begins to recite the poem on camera, the video mixes to the faces of Mohawk children and women, their lips moving in and out of sync with Jacobs’…

  • Accident/Interruption

    An examination of the factors which hinder people, especially women, from finding a voice. “Interruption is a mechanism by which: A) men can prevent women from talking, and B) they can gain the floor for themselves…” – Dale Spender . “After all, the whole point of a sacrifice is that you give up something you never really wanted in the first place.” – John Osborne The roughness of the film is a testament to the determination to work through all the technical problems of the production.Throughout, the questions – how are images (of self, of others, on film) constructed? and…

  • Leaving the Poisons Behind

    Animal, fish and bird pictographs struggle to escape the filmic and musical presence of environmental poisons. Primarily an environmental picture, “Leaving the Poisons Behind” can also be seen as a forum for meditation on the idea of leaving behind personal poisons – smoking, drugs, drinking, abusive relationships, and so on. The film may also be of interest to those who are studying aboriginals and their environmental connections, and to those interested in petroglyphs and other figures from neolithic artists. It is a beautiful film as well as an innovative type of music video in film format, making it accessible to…