Genres: experimental

  • Menses

    A wry comedy on the disagreeable aspects of menstruation. Women act out their own dramas on a California hillside, in a supermarket, in a red-filtered ritual of mutual bonding. “Menses” combines both the imagery and the politics of menstruation in a fine blend of comedy and drama.

  • Mercy

    “Voyeurism, eroticism, violence and pornography are challengingly jumbled together: the result is a mixture of fluttery pictures which cloud what is real and what is not, making the questions that these films provoke all the more disturbing.” – Jane Headon, City Limits “‘Mercy’ shows no mercy as it dissects the games mass media play with our perceptions. It blends found footage, images and sounds into a flow that’s as revealing as it is overwhelming.” – New York Festival Catalogue

  • Arnold

    This is a comedy about a boy who sweeps floors in a Chi-Com drug store and who one day meets a girl. What happens after that is humorously absurd.

  • Metamorphosis

    A satiric parable on non-conformity and the rat race. Meeting self-imposed challenges that begin with undressing and dressing in the time it takes for his elevator to descend nine floors, a man develops increasingly complex tasks to perform in the same period. His comical secret life transforms his existence from banality to oblivion. The film makes extensive use of pixillation techniques.

  • M̵e̵x̵i̵c̵o̵

    “The jury felt the best experimental film would be the work which not only displayed a new way of looking through cinema but which also found something new at which to look. In this spirit the jury has awarded the prize for best experimental film to ‘Mexico’. Although its initial context is a languidly dystopic trip from Toronto to Mexico and back again, its true subject is power: the power inscribed in the unseeing gaze of the tourist, the power manifest in the recently signed North American Free Trade Agreement, under the auspices of which Mexican workers threaten to be…

  • Mid Span and Parallel Views

    These two complex visual puzzles were shot over several months on two of Vancouver’s many bridges – the Lion’s Gate and Burrard Street Bridges. Shots taken at different times are optically printed to produce an unusual portrait of each bridge.

  • midst

    “In ‘midst’, Barbara Sternberg has made a lyrical film about attachment, integration, belonging. Many of the familiar elements of Sternberg’s work are here: speed, pulsing rhythms, explosions of colour, light and shape, images of nature and the built environment. But the conflicted situations and turmoil of earlier major films like ‘Through and Through’ and ‘Beating’ are gone. Instead, ‘midst’ focuses dramatically on an understanding of the world through art, specifically painting, especially abstraction, here translated into filmic terms. Abstraction becomes the vehicle for taking on complexity, putting it all together in heightened moments of intense vision characteristic of ‘seeing into’…

  • Migraine

    The severe pain inflicted during a migraine attack alters the vision of the sufferer often to the point of hallucination. The optical symptoms of this disorder open it up for expressive filmic interpretation. A jumpy and fractured roller-coaster montage is transformed into the comically tortured hallucinations of a migraine sufferer as she loses control of her vision and mental faculties.

  • Migration

    “Rimmer describes “Migration” as ‘organic myth,’ and he recalls that shooting began with the central image of a dead deer on a beach. Subsequently, he worked on either side of that image (shooting and editing) towards a composition that predominantly featured visual rhythms (which) are the result of an integration of two interesting techniques – flash-frame montage and ‘writing’ with the hand-held camera… Naturalism is subordinated to a kinetic interaction with organic life processes and decay.” – Al Razutis, Vancouver Art Gallery

  • Across

    “Across” is about the sometimes difficult journey from one psychic space to another. From a place in the abusive past, to a place called survival.” – Liz Czach, Toronto International Film Festival “Across” has a gentler power, furiously and passionately engaging with the unobtrusive landscape to uncover what most of us have yet to discover.” – Take One, Fall 1997