Film Format: 16mm

  • These Shoes Weren’t Made for Walking

    The filmmaker documents the lives of four women in his family, using their shoes as a common reference and as a springboard for thoughtful and provocative contemplations about their experiences. These four women (paternal grandmother, mother, paternal aunt, sister) recount and discuss the cultural and socio-economic forces that have shaped their lives. From the four-inch “golden lotus” embroidered silk sandals designed to fit my great-grandmother’s bound feet during the Ching Dynasty in Imperial China, to the tennis shoes and Italian leather pumps sported by my career-minded chartered accountant sister, the poignant stories behind their shoes are revealed. The film ends…

  • Between You and Me

    “Between You and Me” (Tangled Garden, Act III, Scene I) looks at the internalization of homophobia and fatalism present in mainstream representations of the AIDS pandemic, as it reflects on the conflict between grief and desire in a gay man’s psyche. The film challenges the viewer to turn their red ribbons into real action both on the streets and in bed, and to resist the industry of AIDS. Also available on QUEERS ON THE VERGE.

  • Thick Lips Thin Lips

    A musical experimental film about racist and homophobic violence.

  • Thigh Line Lyre Triangular

    Only at a crisis do I see both the sense as I’ve been trained to see it (that is, with Renaissance perspective, three-dimensional logic, colors as we’ve been trained to call a color a color, and so forth) and patterns that move straight out from the inside of the mind through the optic nerves – spots before my eyes, so to speak – and it’s a very intensive, disturbing, but joyful experience. I’ve seen that every time a child was born …. Now none of that was in “Window Water Baby Moving”; and I wanted a childbirth film which expressed…

  • Things in Between

    “Things in Between” is a story about a wife, her husband, and his lover. The film invites viewers to share the self-discovery of two women: Betty, an East Indian, who has just left her husband Phil; and Betty’s girlfriend Cannes, a Chinese, who is secretly Phil’s lover. Caught between desire and friendship, they must now face painful choices…

  • Third Degree

    The film is “about” the fragility of the film medium and human vulnerability; both the filmic and the human images resist threat/intimidation/mutilation: the victim is defiant and the film strip also struggles on, both “under fire.” It is a somewhat violent drama but it is also an ironically comic work and there is a formal beauty in the destructiveness of the burning film. While the film (from section to section or from screen to screen, in the installation format) develops, becomes more visually complex, successively regenerates (as the figurative images degenerate), it nevertheless implies no finality; rather, even in its…

  • This is the end of me

    On September 15th, 1830, during the opening ceremony of the first major railway line in Britain, the member of parliament for Liverpool, William Huskisson, attempted to cross the tracks but was struck by the train and died of the injuries he sustained. “This is the end of me” sets out on a true documentary mission – to delve into this historical event – but gets continually sidetracked …. It’s about history, technology, memory, chaos theory, Canada, eyesight, books, trains, speed, death, and Saskatchewan. The film is visually as eclectic as its narration, including documentation (photos, paintings, diagrams, maps); footage of…

  • 3:48

    “‘3:48’ is a film about living and dying in Ontario. I reassembled newsfilm and other footage to write an allusive and associative history that suggests the laws of memory and the processes of dream. The images date from the late 1960s and early 1970s, and depict the everyday: garbage collection, a picket line, children playing in the snow, a building on fire. Most lack the age or resonance that might inject them with nostalgia. However, they do trace the outlines of the small ways we try to make life in this sad place better.” – Blaine Allan

  • Three Homerics

    This film is composed of three sections created to accompany a piece of music (by Barbara Feldman) on a Homeric poem: 1) “Diana holds back the night …” is represented by dark shapes suppressing (almost angularly interfering with) orange-golden effusions of paint and the reflective paint-shapes of early morning greens (as if silhouettes or arm and bodily profile were shading the light), 2) Homer’s “… rolling sea …” represented by hand-painted step-printed dissolves of blues in wave shapes, bubbles, and the soft browns and tender greens of seaweed, flotsam-jetsam, and 3) “Ah, love again, the light” represented by painted explosions…

  • Through and Through

    The film is silent except for four short segments of sync sound, interviews with a man and a woman, which touch on two areas: control and anger, and the pressure of history on one’s identity – how do I identify myself as “I”, how as part of a “We”? The film is visual, perceptual; it was made in awe of the world that goes on with and without us and of our personal, human struggles. It is a film about life and death; a film of discrete units of the eternal and a film of living here and now. It…