Film Categories: Youth

  • Pretending We Were Indians

    “This short animated film represents the recollections of a woman whose native ancestry was obscured by the social mores of the recent past. Tracing fragments of information as she walks, the woman speculates on what really happened to her ancestors and herself.” – Frances Leeming

  • Print No Charge

    When a son and his estranged father embark on a fishing trip together, something goes wrong. “Print No Charge” is the story of a distant and strained relationship with a thought-provoking ending. As a teaching device, the film’s form articulates its content. The film stimulates creative response.

  • Quatuor de l’exil, Le

    This film tells us the story of four francophones, aged 17 to 19, who have come from the war-torn and hunger-ravaged country of Somalia. Having just arrived in Canada, they are searching for cultural reference points that allow them to reconstruct their universe. But the way they live marginalizes them and they do not always recognize themselves in modernity. How can they reconcile old and new, past and present, myth and reality? It is this quest for remembrance, identity and freedom which the filmmaker seeks to capture.

  • Ranky Tanky

    An animated film using cut-outs and a children’s song.

  • Reality Check

    Using cutout pictures from magazines, animated to a harmonica soundtrack, the audience is asked to look around and figure out what is important to us. Perhaps it is not “the automobile and some of the other consumer products that we seem to dote on” (Grand Rapids Press).

  • Bangs

    A comedy about a young Chinese-Canadian girl obsessed with her large egg-like forehead. “A deftly funny work.” – Peter Goddard,The Toronto Star

  • Rock Video

    Poking a little fun at “rock video,” this film uses real rocks that are resilient and amusing.

  • Sammy

    Sammy was a dog I had when growing up in Dundas, Ontario. I found old Super 8 footage of Sammy long after he had passed away, and I decided to work with these images on both a rotoscope and optical printer, to playfully and rhythmically evoke my emotions, memories, and image of little Sammy.

  • Sand

    “Sandpaintings” combines cutout, computer animation and live-action in an exploration of the meanings of symbols in our culture. In the film we see two figures (modelled after characters from Navajo sandpaintings) as they take a journey through an artist’s space, searching for their own meaningful symbols.

  • Santa

    Santa gets his picture taken with a typically bizarre assortment of children of all ages – amateur sociology dredged from the Pacific Centre Mall. Gallagher’s deadpan treatment isolates the ritual moment of image making. As each of the mandatory still souvenir photographs is shot, Gallagher rolls off a few feet of movie film. The soundtrack is a persistent laugh track; Santa’s repeated “Ho Ho Ho.”