Film Categories: Work by Women

  • Artist Spotlight Series: Christina Battle

    Available for purchase in the CFMDC Shop: https://www.cfmdc.org/shop. Christina Battle’s hand-processed, coloured and manipulated films explore the material and transformative possibilities of the film medium. Using techniques such as cameraless animation and collage, she “paints and sculpts” on film. Her work explores built and natural environments, history and the act of collective remembering, and a fascination with weather and storms. Study guide includes an essay by Janine Marchessault, York University. 1) hysteria (2006 35mm 4 min.) An unstable community leads to accusations and panic. Re-considering the Salem witch trials of 1692. Then doesn’t always seem so far off from now.…

  • Artist Spotlight Series: Barbara Sternberg

    Available for purchase in the CFMDC Shop: https://www.cfmdc.org/shop. For more than thirty years, Barbara Sternberg’s filmmaking has considered the mysteries of human existence. Drawing on the creative power of the cinematic medium to make the invisible visible, Sternberg’s films use a resolutely personal approach to explore rhythm, time, space, and the nature of the everyday. Featuring: Opus 40; Transitions; Like a Dream that Vanishes; and Burning. Study guide includes an essay by Barbara Godard, York University. 1) Opus 40 (1979, 16mm, 14:30 min.) “Opus 40” is about repetition: repetition in working and living, repetition through multiplicity and series, repetition to…

  • Artist Spotlight Series: Michelle Mohabeer

    Available for purchase in the CFMDC Shop: https://www.cfmdc.org/shop. In Michelle Mohabeer’s films and videos, form and content are inextricably connected. Re-working the transformational film aesthetics of “third cinema,” Mohabeer’s experimental documentaries blend archival footage with personal memory, infusing each work with a signature pastiche of political consciousness, poetics and performance. Study guide includes an essay by Monika Kin Gagnon, Concordia University. “I recommend these films for researchers working on feminist theory, and the history of feminism, especially those with an interest in Canada and Canadian political identity or Caribbean/South American identity. These films will also be of use in the…

  • Artist Spotlight Series: Gariné Torossian

    Available for purchase in the CFMDC Shop: https://www.cfmdc.org/shop. In her lush, intricately constructed works, Gariné Torossian explores film form, hybrid film and video technologies, and themes of belonging, identity and the body. “Mining a rich palette of colours and textures, superimpositions and dissolves, mixing formats of Super 8, 35mm and video, [she] creates films that bridge the gaps between visual art, sound art, cinema and the rock video” (Lux Distribution). Study guide includes an essay by Ian Balfour, York University. CLICK HERE to download study guide. 1) Visions 2) Girl from Moush 3) Drowning in Flames 4) Pomegranate Tree 5)…

  • Missing Persons

  • Connecting Lines

    Four passengers trace a circular journey connecting Seattle, Los Angeles, New Orleans, Chicago, and back to Seattle again. The action in Connecting Lines takes place in the bar cars of these moving trains, where changing landscapes fill a single moving-picture window, as an eclectic mix of passengers come and go in the foreground. These passengers do the things people on trains usually do: smoke, drink, and tell stories. As characters appear, wander off, and reappear at random, their tales are reinvented and adapted to suit new audiences. All the while, the passing landscape is being shaped into patterns by the…

  • Discrete Moments

    A short experimental film, “Discrete Moments” offers some paradoxical thoughts on the mathematics of “forever and ever.” While a big jet plane crawls across the tarmac, a love held back, goes unnoticed. “Discrete Moments” was produced for the 1994 Cineworks omnibus film Breaking Up in 3 Minutes. Six Vancouver filmmakers were each given 200 feet of film, restricted to one day of shooting, three edits, one track of sound, and asked to make a three minute film about the break-up of a personal relationship.

  • This Missing You

    A short poetic journey through the bittersweet tastes of long distance love.

  • This Time Last Year

    On Thanksgiving of 2001, Daniel set her video camera to run while she and her family got ready to pose for a photograph. One year later, she turns the footage, together with notes from the same time, into a portrait of all that is no longer there. “Daniel explores loss as something sensed, felt and lived with in this poetic portrait of the absences we feel in the moments we capture on film.” – Images Festival 2003

  • Parenthesis

    A simple inadvertent sequence of a few unassuming moments ends up feeling somehow sad and somehow beautiful. How this happens is hard to say. It has something to do with the interplay between what we can and cannot see, the incidental tensions underlying each small moment, the figures forming and reforming on the side.