Genres: experimental

  • Places to Stay

    “Places to Stay” deals with the filmmaker’s impressions as a child immigrant in the 1950s and 1960s; of being relocated from Germany to northern Quebec and northern Ontario, and the subsequent displacement she felt in her new country and culture. Her German heritage caused her to experience a great deal of guilt, confusion and alienation – feelings which pervaded her entire public and high school education. It was not until 1989, a few months before the Berlin Wall came down, that she was able to return to Germany for the first time since leaving there as a small child. Another…

  • Plastic Surgery

    The film draws an analogy between the cutting and suturing of the human body and the reconstruction of the world through film. Using optical printing techniques, it connects diverse elements in a dream-like flow: a vision of mind at play amid the anxieties of our society. It ‘s also an operation on our image systems, including cinema.

  • Pleasure Film (Ahmed’s Story)

    “In a compelling narrative, a woman relates the trials of a hungry man who will go to great lengths to be fed. This latest work by Ann Marie Fleming once again demonstrates the artist’s delicious sense of the absurd. Featuring Valerie Buhagiar, Howard and His Doghouse and the off-screen presence of Ahmed, a master of tall tales.” – Images Festival of Independent Film & Video, Toronto, 1995

  • Plein Air

    This abstract travelogue flies just over the surface of the Canadian Shield in Northern Ontario. “Plein Air” is an engrossing sonic and visual trip and a continuation of Kerr’s fascination with landscape cinema.

  • huit juillets / eight julys

    This experimental documentary explores intergenerational transmission through the story of Dolorès; almost a century of women’s history and Quebec history. Through intimate audio encounters, she invites us to relive her life in a non-chronological way, revealing her victories, her regrets, but above all the feminist roots of a woman who always wanted more than she was allowed to dream for. With a fiery character, a resilience tinged with optimism and a spirit of perpetual questioning, she offers us a retrospective on the last century marked by a quest for intellectual and financial independence. The image, for its part, is a…

  • It’s Not Brakhage

    It’s Not Brakhage is a feature-length parafiction film, structured around an unnamed narrator’s investigation of a mysterious film reel, believed to be a lost work by experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage. Shrouded in speculation and actively contested, the film reel is believed to be the sole remaining artifact from a cancelled 1959 film festival, co-organized by Brakhage and military-industrial giant DuPont chemical. The story follows the narrator’s forensic deconstruction of the film reel’s history, sifting through a patchwork of theories and speculations that have arisen since its discovery, and connecting the artifact to DuPont’s wider networks of military-industrial research and artistic…

  • Salvage Archives

    Salvage Archives continues Rufelds’ research into cultural and subcultural expressions of late capitalist alienation, and the forms of collective storytelling that take shape under the shadows of unjust material systems. Told in a hybrid narrative style, mixing elements of essay film, social realism, and neo-noir, Salvage Archives oscillates between two narrative threads, counterposing a lonely online conspiracy theorist and a disembodied historian of agriculture. The two figures recount their stories in alternating chapters, perversely mirroring each other as they wade into the knotted abstractions of capitalist productive systems, logistics networks, patterns of accumulation, and systemic waste. As both narrators’ grandiose…

  • Private Flowers

    In 1832, a Canadian Infantryman was hanged for making love with another man. The victim’s rank was Private, and his name was Flowers. Commissioned by Toronto History Museums’ Artist Mentorship Showcase: Pride with Mentor Ashley Mckenzie-Barnes with additional support from the open space residency programme at the National Ballet, TD Bank, Pride Toronto and the Ontario Arts Council. Created as part of Awakening with Toronto History Museums Private Flowers is part of a series of art projects by Black, Indigenous and artists of colour, operating under the principles of anti-oppression, anti-colonialism and anti-racism and is part of the City’s efforts…

  • Fractures chimiques ON/OFF

    Fractures Chimiques – ON/OFF is the result of an audiovisual performance combining 16mm projection and reactive electronic music. Using a sensor device attached directly to the screen, the light information escaping from the projectors is collected and transferred to modular synthesizers which generate the film’s live soundtrack. Fractures Chimiques – ON/OFF is the first film of a series of experiments on the relationship between music and film in performative contexts.

  • La dureté du mental

    “It’s a distraction for many, a profession for a few, when for me sport is my whole life. And if fighting is the reason you’re living. If every muscle clamors : train me, exercise, put on a sprint. Find a competitor or at least fight against a pole. It’s hard to get started but it’s otherwise difficult to stop. Even with your back against the mat. Never mind. You have to stand up and go further. You will now have to fight against yourself.” Transforming Olympic wrestling and pole vaulting Soviet films from the 1980s into expressive, painterly imagery, the…