Film Categories: Work by Women

  • Echoes

    A woman reflects on the off-beat moments and stirrings of girlhood experiences that shaped her life. Available on DVD on the compilation “Artist Spotlight Series: Michelle Mohabeer.”

  • Garden in Khorkhom

    “Garden in Khorkhom” is an impressionistic documentary inspired by the works of Armenian-American painter Arshile Gorky. The film is a tapestry of footage provided by Atom Egoyan’s “Ararat” and footage shot by Torossian. It is an homage to Arshile Gorky, focusing on his relationship to Armenian art and his mother.

  • Cat Food

    “A cat eats its methodical way through a polymorphous fish. The projector devours the ribbon of film at the same rate, methodically. The lay of Grimnir mentions a wild boar whose magical flesh was nightly devoured by the heroes of Valhalla, and miraculously regenerated next morning in the kitchen. The fish in Wieland’s film, and the miraculous flesh of the film itself, are reconstructed on the rewinds to be devoured again. Here is a dionysian metaphor, old as the West, of immense strength. Once we see that the fish is the protagonist of the action, this metaphor reverberates to incandescence…

  • Night Blue

    Maani is restless. Nina is obsessed. Maani shuttles from hotel to airport on the international fashion circuit, while Nina holes up in her studio, dreaming of designs for her antique fabrics and delicate beads. This morning Maani arrives at Nina‘s studio and finds herself curiously suspended. She wants to stay, but Nina is sure she cannot. The characters and story in this film are the result of a collaboration between the actors and director in seven months of improvisation.

  • Cat Swallows Parakeet and Speaks!

    A gothic romp through a crumbling hospital. The last time you saw a tabloid, maybe the headline read “Man Gives Birth to Nine-Pound Baby Girl,” or perhaps, “Melt Fat Away As You Eat Your Favorite Foods!” Taking such absurd claims as its starting point, “Cat Swallows Parakeet and Speaks!” puts the “Arabian Nights” saga through a surreal feminist revision. In the classic tale, a mythical character must tell stories to survive a man who is trying to murder her and all other women. In this version, Scheherazade is a strikingly beautiful model recovering in hospital after an ulcer operation. She…

  • Malled

    Follow Tyler, an incredibly well-dressed beacon of young queerness, through the midwestern mall where she works. She tries to sort out her future while surrounded by dancing girls, beauty queen children, and constant consuming.

  • Pustulations

    “Pustulations” is a short animated film using the painting-on-glass technique. It is about one woman’s compulsion to pick at her skin and the purulent, pustular world beneath it. Awards: National Film Board of Canada Award for Best Emerging Canadian Film or Video Maker, Images Festival of Independent Film and Video, Toronto, ON, 2004 Also available on FEM CRIT.

  • Term, The

    A lovely and spare animated film illustrating the poem, “The Term,” by William Carlos Williams. The film is an homage to the work of Williams and to the school of Imagist Poetry, which he founded and best exemplifies. The filmmaker chose this particular poem because of the power of the imagery, the constant metamorphosis, the musicality of the words and the gentle humanistic quality of the message. All these things lend themselves well to film: particularly to the style of animation she has developed. The animation is hand-drawn pencil on paper, fully animated twelve drawings per second. The drawings illustrate…

  • If

    “If” is a story of longing and loss, taking place within the confines of a room whose objects represent the emotional perceptions of space, and the missing lovers presence. The reality of the outside world encroaches on the inner-space of daydreaming.

  • If You Lived Here, You’d Be Home By Now

    “If You Lived Here, You’d Be Home By Now” is about the divisiveness over land, the relationship of public and private space in small-town America, and the concept of home. Using documentary strategies, landscape stills are juxtaposed to stories “ripped from the headlines” of a small-town newspaper. The struggle over public space described in the stories reflects universal concepts of space, privacy and property ownership.