Genres: documentary

  • Rattle

    The film is, at once, a document of a great Canadian multinational facing perilous agricultural “sophistication,” and a lament – a witness to the element of ruin that plagues industry. The Massey Harris King Street Factory (Toronto) was built in 1879 to a chorus of consternation. The size and scope were unprecedented in Canada at that time, and it established this company (later to be Massey Ferguson) as a major manufacturing firm in the agricultural industry. The film is a journey through the remnants of the factory which, for years, served as the pillar of the corporation. Seen from afar,…

  • Re-entry: Stories of Six Women

    Six women of different ethnic and economic backgrounds, ranging in age from early 30s to 60s, tell their individual stories of returning to school or job training, of juggling child raising and house keeping with school and jobs, of support by family and the support they feel is needed for women like them. Must women be superwomen to find fulfillment? These women’s stories are interwoven to produce inspiring and sobering reflections on many women’s lives. Produced for the Santa Cruz Chapter of the Older Women’s League (OWL).

  • Red Rocket

    In 1929, there were speakeasies, Charleston dancers, gangsters and jazz. It was the year the stock market crashed and a group of men sat down to design the streetcar of the future. They were ten feet high, forty-six feet long and weighed twenty tons. The manufacturer called them streamliners, the public called them “Red Rockets.” The film captures the spirit and grace of the now-famous streetcars which have fired the imagination of rail buffs and the public alike for three generations.

  • Return to Departure: The Biography of a Painting – Or Watching Paint Dry and Other Realisms

    “This innovative feature documentary deals with both painting and documentary filmmaking as fictional processes. While the camera records, in extreme close-up, the chronological development of the super-realist painting, ‘Return to Departure,’ a multi-level asynchronous soundtrack builds up a parallel sound portrait of the (unseen) artist at work – a rambling, cheerfully free-associating monologue interspersed with radio music, children’s voice, telephone interruptions. “Gradually, we see more and more of the surface of the painting and of the working artist; beautifully shot and manipulated footage conveys the mixing of pigments, minute accumulation of figurative detail, endless compromises between vision and canvas. By…

  • Reunion in Dunnville

    This film started out as a community project involving my students at Sheridan College. On one level, it documents a remarkable reunion of people from as far away as Australia and New Zealand who converge on a small town in rural Ontario, where 2,436 Allied pilots received their training during World War II. A subtext emerges in the dialectic between our own newsreel footage of the event in 1979, and home movies shot by the veterans, including reunions at the base before it became a giant turkey farm. This allows for some revealing interruptions of conventional documentary codification, and serves…

  • Revival

    A vivid cinema-verité documentary on street-corner revivalism in Toronto, this film probes the compulsions of self-appointed voices in the wilderness. Fast-paced, beautifully edited.

  • Bapuji – The Path of Love

    A film portrait of Swami Shri Kirpalvanadji, one of the greatest living masters of yoga in the world today. For the past thirty years Bapuji, as he is affectionately called by those who follow his teaching, has spent ten hours of every day in deep meditation. His unique journey through the struggles of the spiritual path have brought him to a stage of consciousness that yogis say occurs only once every five hundred years. This is one of the first films to reveal the daily practices of a great master – practices usually carried out in solitude. His life and…

  • Rochdale College 1970

    Rochdale College was an experiment with new ideas and ways of living while being conventionally forced to live within the old, dead civilization and its structures. The results inevitably show confusion and angered disillusionment. The new ideas and ways, never allowed time to evolve and produce positive results, were smothered for the sake of convenience and convention. The film is ultimately a nostalgic reminiscence of the Sixties.

  • ROM (Royal Ontario Museum)

    Objects on display at the museum are viewed, initially by a constantly moving camera that never fixes on anything for long. In the latter half of the film the camera continues to move, but concentrates on a specific artifact. Two kinds of scanning.

  • Rumours of War

    “Rumours of War” is a playful look, through a jaundiced eye, of the street preachers, Christians and charismatics that populate the streets of downtown Toronto. Through interviews, live action, text and montage, the filmmaker reveals the individuals behind the sermons, allowing their voices to be heard beyond the confines of their sidewalk pulpits. Ignoring foul weather, hecklers and occasional violence, the evangelists tirelessly exhort the faithless to repent before it’s too late.