Film Categories: Work by Women
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Leftovers
In “Leftovers”, Janine Fung’s wild narration about misunderstandings in her traditional Chinese family plays over images of her mother carving turkey. Also available on QUEERS ON THE VERGE.
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Let Me Wrap My Arms Around You
Leila is haunted by dreams. Dreams of drowning, of a love long since gone cold, and the frozen place in the far north where it all happened – Rankin Inlet, NWT. Intoxicated by love, she travelled there long ago to live with her chosen one, only to fall victim to a crippling internal disease and a debilitating, hallucinatory winter that claimed her passion and, for a time, her sanity.
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Letter from Violet, A
“A Letter from Violet” is dedicated to the memory of Violet McNaughton, a Saskatchewan woman who was instrumental in women getting the vote in the province in 1916. Violet saw the vote as a tool towards social reform rather than the ultimate goal. She lived by the motto “the welfare of each is the concern for all” and firmly believed in both the equality of the sexes and the need for men and women to work together. Part of “Five Feminist Minutes.”
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Ley Lines
“Taking her own last name as her primary organizing principle in approaching the past, Patricia Gruben has constructed one of the most inventive personal archeologies and family histories ever filmed. Over six years in the making, ‘Ley Lines’ eschews conventional narrative storytelling in favour of associative and cumulative revelation… “Gruben criss-crosses the globe as she traces the Gruben family back to Texas and then to Germany, only to end up in the present in Tuktoyaktuk. Her magical and unpredictable exploration makes innumerable stops along the way to consider such matter as satellites, DNA, geomancy, dowsing, Jimmy Dean, Hitler, the Thule…
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Lives of Performers
“Lives of Performers” unfolds in roughly fourteen episodes, each characterized by a different cinematic treatment of the real and fictional aspects of Rainer’s role of director and choreographer and of the performers’ roles during the making of previous work and the film itself. The first section is edited footage of an actual rehearsal of “Walk, She Said” for a live performance at the Whitney Museum. The second section shows photographic documentation of a theatrical work from 1971 called “Grand Union Dreams,” while the voice over narration describes the content of the photos and the changing intimacies of the performers, fictional…
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Lockjaw
A babbling talking cure; an explanation; a walking tongue; a description of the juncture between I and you; the difference between what I feel and what I know; the body, the mind and what stands between – LOCKJAW.
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Low Visibility
This is the first feature directed by Patricia Gruben, who created the much-admired “The Central Character” and the award-winning “Sifted Evidence.” Gruben is one of Canada’s foremost filmmakers, part of a new generation which combines avant-garde techniques with narrative elements. “Low Visibility” finds a man wandering alone on a snowy mountain roadside, waving his arms and shouting at the sky. The enigmatic Mr. Bones, an apparent amnesiac, is unableor unwilling to explain what has happened to him. He arouses, as a result, the curiosity not only of the doctors and nurses of the hospital he is taken to, but also…
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Magic Man
A ritualistic mood piece with colour-rich images. With Robert Cowan, Mike Kuchar, Donna Kerness, Mr. E and others.
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Making a Scene
Offers passersby the opportunity to don a mask and become either an elephant or a mosquito. A look at people’s inhibitions.
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Man Who Envied Women, The
Jack Deller, a professor of Foucauldian and Lacanian theory, is left by his artist-wife after four years of marriage. Deller is played by two actors; the wife is never seen. Her voice is heard throughout – it governs the film. The camera pursues him on the image track, while her voice pursues her train of thought. The structure of the film is elaborated in a constant interweaving of fiction and documentary, narrative and theory, amidst issues of sexuality, aging, power relations, and political activism.
