Film Format: 16mm

  • Blues Accordin’ to Lightnin’ Hopkins

    In his own words and music, Lightnin’ Hopkins reveals the inspiration for his blues. He sings, jives, ponders. He boogies at an outdoor barbecue and a black rodeo and takes you with him on a homecoming visit to his boyhood home of Centerville, Texas. Blank has captured Lightnin’s blues in their fullest, darkest power. The film reaches “past the impish bluesman himself into the Blues itself, into the red-clay Texas, into hard times, into blackness, into the senses… you begin to understand the reasons why black Texas people might be in love with this land and angry at poverty” (Carmen…

  • Panic Bodies

    “Filmed in the shadow of AIDS, ‘Panic Bodies’ is Hoolboom’s testament to the permanent impermanence of the flesh. The film’s six parts show the range of Hoolboom’s engagement with mortality, from rage to reverie … Whether he’s remixing ‘Terminator 2’ or concocting a female paradise, Hoolboom finds a balance between razor-sharp intellect and palpable love for images and sounds. To watch ‘Panic Bodies’ is to see what it means to live and die in the cinema.” – Cameron Bailey, NOW “Paul Rioeur said the toughest things humans have to face are that we die and not everyone loves us. ‘Panic…

  • last split second, the

    Toronto artist Andy Patton’s account of breaking his back was adapted to performance by Judith Doyle in 1981. Mounted at the now-legendary Funnel Experimental Film Centre in Toronto, “Transcript – On Pain” was presented in the form of recorded voice-over with slides of text. Andy Patton described his trauma with extraordinary clarity and insight. For “the last split second,” Judith Doyle uses her original voice recording from “Transcript” as a base for imagery. Glass shatters into light. A hospital corridor is reframed into the “tunnel vision” of shock. Medical scans, anatomical drawings, and animations of the brain and spine reveal…

  • Blue Venice / Red Hotel

    A meneral memory movie, “Blue Venice / Red Hotel” consists of seven loops of B&W film projected at various speeds and re-filmed off the wall; magnified, superimposed, filtered red and blue. The loops were built from “The Red Hotel,” an earlier film and one which was shot at high velocity frame by frame. This new film came out of a desire to explode seconds of Venice that appear in “The Red Hotel.”

  • Ballad of Don Quinn, The

    What do you do when you wake up one morning and find your leather jacket doesn’t quite fit anymore and your spiky green hair has gone grey? Get your band back together of course. “The Ballad of Don Quinn” tells the story of southern Saskatchewan’s original punk rocker and his attempts to resurrect his band a decade after their scarcely noticed demise. Years ahead of the Sex Pistols and Hard Core Logo. “One of the top ten Canadian short films of the 1990s.” – Cinémascope magazine “A landmark film.” – Brian Stockton: The Best of Western Canadian Comedy

  • bodies of water

    “Bodies of water” is a poetic memory of the filmmaker’s return to the Ganges River in India where her grandparents were cremated. It was only with her generation that daughters were included on the family tree. Was she now relevant? Impressionistic, meditative images of water are superimposed with slide guitar and tablas.

  • Mother Daughter Love

    A mother and her look-alike young daughter have died and are wandering their home-town looking for a way to come back to life. A young man who doesn’t realize they are dead agrees to show them around town. As the tour progresses, he remembers and notices progressively strange things about them, and becomes caught between his desire to help and his fear. Little does he know, they face a time limit, as do we all. This is a creepy yet beautiful tale of regeneration and rebirth.

  • Pensão Globo

    A man facing his approaching death takes what is perhaps his last journey and ends up in “Pensao Globo” in Lisbon, where he sets out on aimless excursions throughout the city. With oversaturated colours, both sanguine and succulent, vision swims and slips away in echoing superimpositions. These overlapping exposures convey a sense of the permeable boundaries between life and death.

  • Belly, Femur. Femur, Belly

    A chance meeting between the supercool, worldly wise Belly and the awkward, heart-broken Femur becomes an afternoon roam around the city. Their day culminates into what would seem to be a simple gesture to most but proves pivotal for these two. Written and directed by Laura Cowell, who plays both roles. An homage to the “Parent Trap”? Or taking the notion of random crushes to a more complicated level?

  • Spent

    This film takes the viewer into the depths of the film noir world with black-and-white shadowy images. The film, however, is distinctly modern, unsettling and mysterious. Eric is a secret agent whose double identity and dangerous missions are completely hidden from the people closest to him. As his lies and betrayal come to the forefront due to reckless behaviour, his relationships crumble and his secret life becomes all-consuming.