Genres: hand-processed

  • Visions

    A film-within-a-film exploring the body in motion, frame by frame. Built with four frames within one, half of the screen in motion, the other still, this film makes the viewer feel that they are watching a “moving picture.” The sensation one gets is of tension…expectation…shock. It freezes one in a frame. The glorious, trenchant music of R. Murray Schafer in the background further adds to the intense “high” of the film. The film consists of images of a dancer in motion alongside still images of bodies and faces in intense masturbation. These powerful images and motions coincide with the chaotic…

  • Light in Our Lizard Bellies, The

    Through choreography and performance by Susanna Hood, and editing and effects in exposure caused by hand-processing, “The Light in Our Lizard Bellies” reflects the intensities that discombobulate us as we go through change and face parts of ourselves previously denied or unknown. “A beautiful capturing of the triumph of the human spirit.” – Barbara Goslawski (Toronto film critic) “I have never seen a dance film work so magically. It is cinematic instead of just choreographic. The hand processing is rich, pushing the film past time. The texture and contrast do that poetic thing of transporting you. Transcendent.” – James Herbert…

  • Boulder Blues and Pearls and…

    Peripheral envisionment of daily life as the mind has it – i.e. a terrifying ecstasy of (hand-painted) synapting nerve ends back-firing from thought’s grip of life. Music by Rick Corrigan.

  • Smack

    Part documentary, part fiction, and highly experimental, Steve Sanguedolce’s “Smack” follows the story of three brothers (Antonio, Sybil and Zed) as they try to find their way in the world. The brothers exercise their youthful autonomy in defiant ways, exploring all that is forbidden (drugs, crime, violence). Their teenage years are filled with unhealthy, dangerous and criminal behaviour that eventually begins to pull them apart. The stories are told by actual subjects talking about their own lives, and range from religious transformations to heroin overdoses; they are funny, frightening, horrifying and all real. Toronto-based director/cinematographer Steve Sanguedolce matches these interconnected…

  • Minus

    “Minus” is a hand-processed, uncut, singular stream of movements. To take away: either to leave remnants of light or to leave remnants of rhythms. Entirely hand-processed and unscathed by the blades of the splicer. This is Chong’s first 16mm film. Inspired by Ritchie Hawkin’s Concept albums.

  • After Eden

    “ … a beautiful journey through the wasteland of displaced souls, loosely structured around biblical stories. A man becomes a traveller after his home is destroyed; the story expands to examine those who are literally or metaphorically homeless. In this alien world, existing between fact and fiction, a provocative question is asked: Where does one go after losing paradise?” – Liz Czach, Toronto International Film Festival “Part diary film … part urban ethnography … part excavation in search of faith amidst landscapes of concrete, it is a compilation film assembled from rolls of super-8 and 16mm that I shot, hand…

  • Wreck / Nation

    Two films in one. Wreck: “I passed the wreck not long after crossing into Saskatchewan. Day 3, alone, driving west towards Vancouver. On the other side of the highway, a twisted mess of iron and steel. Rail cars like beached whales strewn arbitrarily in heaps rupturing the perspective symmetry of the endless prairie. At once an allusion to the fallibility of industrialization and modernity. I felt after it had flashed past the windscreen, that there were significations here that reached far deeper than this immediate literal interpretation. Half an hour after I had watched the image recede completely into the…

  • Tiny Bubbles

    A discreet sharing of secrets.

  • Hand Job

    A lonely figure walks to a private screening room. What he is getting excited about is not what it may appear. “Hand Job” is a hand-processed, manipulated, and toned film that shows the filmmaker’s true love for the medium.

  • Passing Through

    “Passing Through” is haunted by a song about love and marriage that can’t be fully recalled – or completely forgotten. In this beautifully hand-processed film nothing seems to fit properly. The streets of a small, Ontario town become associative paths for memory when desire stretches the seams of expectation.