Genres: documentary

  • 100 Crushes Chapter 6: They

    “The director’s feelings of envy and resentment of a roommate’s pronoun-of-choice eventually evolve into delight in one simple word. This freedom allows for new embodiments of gender—as beautiful and strange as a unicorn, a pair of wings or a bouquet of roses.” — Inside Out 2014 Toronto LGBT Film Festival

  • SPANKIN

    An anagram of “napkins,” SPANKIN transposes the gay hanky code of the 70s onto contemporary coffee culture. Although humorous in content, SPANKIN is an allegory for hierarchical relations within minority groups, consumerist co-optation of identity, and the collective historical forgetting of repression and resistance. The older man has lived through it, the middle-aged man has heard about it and needs to look it up, while the young man is oblivious. Inspired by the criminalization of homosexual behaviour in Russia, India, Nigeria, and Uganda in 2013, SPANKIN revives the handkerchief code formulated during a similar period of suppression in North America…

  • Up In A Plane

    Following the life of war hero Kenneth Owen Moore, Up in a Plane transforms a granddaughter’s grief into a joyfully animated adventure through the Canadian prairies of the early 1900s, the Second World War, the present and beyond.

  • Change Over Time

    Change Over Time is an animated, experimental, personal documentary about the filmmaker’s first year on testosterone from an impressionistic and poetic perspective. The filmmaker asks himself the questions, what kind of man will I become? What emotional and soul changes will I experience during this time? The result is a distilled, evocative poem of Ewan’s musings on loss, love, and change through the use of stop-motion and digital animation, still photography, and time-lapse cinematography. Change Over Time will leave viewers with the wave of the filmmaker’s experiences washing over them.

  • An Evening with The Impostors

    For more than a decade, Mirvish Productions operated La Cage Theatre in downtown Toronto. The theatre’s resident performers, The Impostors, have earned rave reviews over the years but it’s the show’s final number that gives them a major standing ovation. In An Evening with The Impostors, the group prepares to bring their high-glam drag spectacle to the small town of Port Hope, Ontario. The Impostors are ready, but is Port Hope ready for The Impostors?

  • Death Of A Bathhouse

    Combining footage from the final days of St. Marc’s Spa with interviews from Toronto artists Sky Gilbert, Keith Cole, Brad Fraser, Drasko Bogdanovic and Shane MacKinnon, The Reading Salon looks at one of Toronto’s longest running bathhouses through the lens of the artist.

  • Geriatrica

    Geriatrica is a diminished landscape, both physical and mental. 90-year-old Maria pushes a medical walker down a nursing home corridor. A camera strapped to the walker tracks her movements. She was once a world traveler, but now the corridor defines the extent of her universe. Maria manages information like an exhausted swimmer treading water, grasping at the same few thoughts endlessly, never getting anywhere. All information is new, then rapidly sinks out of sight. Maria wants to die, but is no longer capable of doing anything about it. Geriatrica is about being lost forever in the now.

  • Aged

    Aged is an experimental documentary about the relationship between aging and corporeal perception. From 2005 -2011, along with my sisters, I was a caregiver for my father, during his swift movement into old age. Over this period I maintained a practice of diaristic sketching using film, video and sound, and through this process I collected a significant archive of intimate moments, at the summer cottage, where my father chose to die. This raw material has been worked and reworked through various modes of digital and filmic manipulation. Ultimately Aged uncovers the common process of aging, the cinematic elements acting as…

  • To Taste The Ground

    To Taste the Ground is a lyrical documentary that viscerally moves through the seasonal life cycle of a small organic farm in British Columbia, Canada. The remote farm exists off grid in the Fraser Canyon with solar power and water that flows from the surrounding mountains. The relationship between the farmers and their environment is one of equality and respect. The camera embodies this by capturing an experience of season and place. The seasons moving over the landscape embody a character in itself and the farmers live and move within this rhythm. Shooting on a 16mm Bolex camera addresses both…

  • ub2

    Listings on gay dating websites increasingly specify that the poster is “clean” or “disease-free” and requests of his potential matches, “ub2” (internet-speak for “you be, too”). Of course, people are free to specify anything that’s important to them, but how does the choice of these words impact the HIV+ men who read them? What image does it give of our community? Do words matter?