Genres: narrative

  • Roses Are Blue

    “Roses Are Blue” is a short dramatic film exploring a woman’s sensual awakening to spiritual and feminist transformation. A blend of sci-fi, mysticism and modern relationship angst, “Roses Are Blue” was broadcast on WTN (Women’s Television Network) and won 2nd Prize at the 1998 Glebe Scenefest in Sydney, Australia. It features music by David Logan, Chip Yarwood and Edie Steiner.

  • RSVP

    “RSVP” is a lyrical piece which explores the emotions felt by a group of people, some who knew, and some who did not know, a man who has just died. Its approach, however, is unusual: there is almost no dialogue, but rather a central piece of music – “Le Spectre de la Rose” from Berlioz’ Les Nuits d’Eté, performed by Jessye Norman. This piece was requested by the man several weeks before his death; it plays on the radio, ironically, as his lover, Sid, returns home from the funeral. The music forms a link between various people listening to it…

  • Rules of the Road

    “Rules of the Road” tells the story of a love affair and its demise through one of the primary objects shared by the couple: an old beige station wagon with fake wood paneling along the sides. A typical American family car for an atypical American family, it provides them at first with all the familiar comforts. But when their relationship ends, the car becomes the property of one woman and the bane of the other’s existence. Even long after their separation, this tangible reminder of their life together – and thousands of its imitators- continues to prowl the streets of…

  • Scavengers, The

    A post-war fable. A young man is sent by his mother to search for his sister, long since lost. He moves slowly from a rural to an urban environment. He experiences violence and absurdity and, due to his inability to see, to imagine, instigates the film’s central, ironic sequence. The film depicts the main character’s sense of loss and wonder at the world and his subsequent feeling of desperation. Simultaneously, one can perceive in the character of the young woman an ability to see alternatives, to see the possibility of change in her life. This imagination and its necessity for…

  • Scenes from Macbeth

    “Scenes from Macbeth” is a pared-down version of Shakespeare’s tragedy of ambition, set in the world of contemporary Toronto’s business elite. Macbeth’s rise is spurred by the prophecy of three bag ladies; his fall is planned over a power lunch. The story is filmed in a hyperbolic style with no respect for tradition.

  • Scientific Girl, The

    “The Scientific Girl” explores the “outbreak” of 1940’s Hollywood films featuring mentally ill heroines – Olivia de Havilland in “The Snake Pit,” for example. By tracing the treatment of hysterical women in the 1890s, our heroine, the Scientific Girl, reveals how women’s problems have been stereotyped and how the “evil-seductress effect” works. “An intelligent attempt to span generations and cinematically tie together the treatment of hysteria in women as a form of entertainment…an intriguing subject.” – Cinema Canada

  • BBQ Muslims

    In this short comedy, two Canadian Muslim brothers are sleeping in their home when the barbecue in the backyard blows up. They are immediately suspected of being dangerous Middle Eastern terrorists and their neighbourhood turns against them. This film was inspired by events following the Oklahoma City bombing.

  • Sifted Evidence

    A woman is telling the story of how she went to Mexico looking for an obscure archaeological site; how she met a man who promised to take her there; how they stayed together locked in cross-purposes and misunderstandings – how, but never why. The central event has been reconstructed through stills, narration, and enactment by two performers in a tableau limited by the boundaries of a front projection screen. “Patricia Gruben’s striking featurette starts like a parody of anthropological film and turns into an hallucinatory subjective account of one woman’s Mexican misadventure. Among the most assured experimental narratives of the…

  • Sisters of the Silver Scalpel

    A comic documentary about a team of researchers from television’s “Wilderness on Parade” and their expedition to Newfoundland to study a vanishing species of nun life known as “Sisters of the Silver Scalpel.” This “migrant prayer group” is accosted by a liberated coffee show hostess and force-fed hypnotizing birth control pills. The film ends with the capture of a young nun for placement in a zoo. Presented in the straightforward, television documentary fashion of the late 1950s, the use of clichés and exaggerations pokes fun at both style and subject.

  • Small Pleasures

    “Small Pleasures” is the first Chinese-Canadian feature film made by a Chinese-Canadian. It is about two young women from Beijing studying in Toronto, who experience life in the West during the Tiananmen Square student demonstrations in 1989.