Film And Video

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Open Access
Kewekapawetan: Return After the Flood
(2014-07-09) Dysart, Jennifer Faye Leigh; Hoffman, Philip J
The people of South Indian Lake Manitoba are slowly leaving behind a long period of social crisis brought on by the damming of their namesake lake in the 1970’s. The environmental devastation still exists, but the community returns to their original village site once a year for a gathering called Kewekapawetan, meaning “going back” or “looking back” in the Cree language. My film documents my interactions with family members at this gathering in 2008, and uses archival and found footage spanning fifty years, to show how this yearly event represents a positive cultural change for the community. As the filmmaker, I am not only documenting these subtly monumental events; I am also tracing my own disconnected personal history to this place. Central to the story is my father’s unwillingness to return to his family home that he left a long time ago, and my own desire to forge new bonds with this “home” where I have never resided. For the community, revisiting the place where our grandparents lived brings hope for the future after a long period of despair. In parallel, my film documents my personal hope that I will be one day be able to unite my family.
Open Access
Operation Untitled
(2014-07-09) Demers, Joshua Andrew; Buchbinder, Amnon
Operation Untitled is a screenplay exploring the self-empowerment of the individual against the socio-political and religious forces that inform the hierarchy of a Catholic high school. The protagonist, Peter Charles who becomes known by the moniker “the Prophet,” is a hard-working student from a lower class background who’s infatuated by his school and society’s promise that hard work = success. When he learns that he loses a life-changing scholarship simply because the recipient, “the Golden Boy” Richard Harding, has influence, his faith in this system is shattered. His subsequent journey of rebellion creates a school-wide revolution and with the power it brings him, the Prophet has a fateful decision: to replace Richard as “the Golden Boy” or to break the cycle of this broken system forever.
Open Access
Blind
(2014-07-09) Garrity, Sean Michael James; Kazimi, Ali
“Blind” tells the story of a man who quits his job and buys an RV to drive his daughter, who is losing her sight, across Canada to see the Rocky Mountains before she goes blind. The film is framed with the narrative device of a voice-over from a “filmmaker” who is contemplating a film he wants to make, about a girl who goes blind. The film comes into being as the filmmaker imagines it, with many details left out, to be decided later, before actually making the film. The purpose of this thesis support paper is to examine and lay bare my creative process over the course of making the short film, BLIND; to make explicit, for myself, a process that has always been instinctual. In addition to a brief overview of some theorectical frameworks, this will involve an examination of the sources and references that I drew upon in creating the film, and more importantly, an analysis of the deeply personal, challenging insights I have been exposed to in the course of my study.
Open Access
Shadow of the Headframe
(2014-07-28) Lean, Victoria Brigitte; Kazimi, Ali
Shadow of the Headframe is a feature length essay film that paints a complex portrait of the Attawapiskat First Nation – a place that is a homeland for some, and a new frontier for others. In the shadow of a De Beers diamond mine, the remote indigenous community lurches from crisis to crisis, while facing eroding treaty rights and an inability to directly benefit from resource revenues. Filmed over five years, Shadow of the Headframe follows Attawapiskat’s journey from obscurity and into the international spotlight during the protest movement, Idle No More. Weaving together great distances, intimate everyday scenes, and archive images, the documentary chronicles the First Nation’s fight for awareness and justice in the face of repeated attempts to thwart their demands. This supporting document provides insight into the film’s theoretical foundations, production process, and creative treatment, as well as background information on the historical and socioeconomic context.
Open Access
What Keeps A Man Alive: Screenplay and Analysis
(2015-01-26) Svirsky, Illia; Wiseman, Howard M.
Set during WWII, What Keeps a Man Alive tracks the fate of a renowned filmmaker and a crew of concentration camp inmates after they are coerced into producing a fraudulent documentary to deceive inspectors from the Red Cross. Loosely based on events that transpired in Theresienstadt concentration camp in the summer of 1944, the screenplay explores themes of documentary bias, the thin line between truth and fiction, heroism and self-sacrifice, and the strength of familial bonds as they are tested in extreme conditions.
Open Access
Notes from the Anthropocene
(2015-01-26) Long, Terra Jean; Hoffman, Philip J.
Notes from the Anthropocene is an experimental essay film that explores the cultural imagination of the dinosaur as a souvenir for 21st century humans. The icon of the dinosaur shifts between narratives of extinction and human exceptionalism and power. The materiality of the dinosaur whether fossil or plastic toy has, through popular culture, become entrenched in the imaginary of oil extraction and fossil fuel production. Notes from the Anthropocene is a speculative iconological look at the dinosaur, and its resurrection in the Anthropocene, the proposed geological era where humans are the dominating force on the planet, and its symbolic relationship to an increasing ambivalence towards the natural world.
Open Access
Liompa
(2015-08-28) Lazebnik, Elizabeta; Greyson, John R.
Shot in Russian with English subtitles, Liompa is a fifteen-minute dramatic film based on the 1928 short story by Russian novelist Yuri Olesha (1899-1960). "Liompa" explores the relationship between an individual and the things that he owns or desires to own throughout his life. The film looks at this relationship from the perspective of three people at different stages in their lives: a dying man, a teenage boy and a four-year-old.
Open Access
All That is Solid: A Celluloid Exploration of Brutalist Architecture
(2015-08-28) Kolcze, Eva; Hoffman, Philip
All That Is Solid is an experimental film that investigates Brutalist architecture through the decayed surface of black and white celluloid. The film features three locations: Robarts Library, The University of Toronto Scarborough campus (UTSC) and the Ross building at York University. All are prominent examples of Brutalist architecture on university campuses. Footage of the buildings has been degraded using photochemical processes that result in unique patterns of decay. The decay processes are used to draw material and aesthetic connections between concrete and celluloid. By distressing and dissolving images of massive buildings, the film explores how time breaks down all materials, even solid concrete. The film also explores the shifting reactions and responses to the buildings, from their initial praise by the architectural community as cutting edge and futuristic, to the intense public backlash that followed shortly after they were built.
Open Access
A Late Thaw
(2015-08-29) Barr, Kimberley Angela; John R Greyson, John R.
A Late Thaw is an eighteen-minute drama based on the loss of my boyfriend in an ice climbing accident when I was nineteen. The film is largely a poetic exploration of love, grief, and hope. The narrative is fictionalized in order to tap into the universal themes embedded in such an experience. It exposes how unresolved grief can be triggered by outside forces, changes and upheavals, or by inner forces such as a desire to hold on to the memory of the loved one. In some cases, feelings of grief can remain frozen until an event draws attention to that which is still in need of healing. Often feelings of pain and loss become intertwined with love. These conscious and unconscious forces complicate the healing process. The goal of the film is to recount the story events (cause) while expressing the inner grief process (effect), creating two story worlds and bridging them together in a seamless way. The challenge lay in externalizing an internal process so that the viewer would understand and perhaps recognize the feelings being conveyed. The research behind the film reflects this bridging of inner and outer worlds, as I turned inwards to my memories, the healing process, and physical artifacts of that time, and outwards towards research in Post Traumatic Stress as well as other films that explore similar themes and subject matter. Part memoir, part research, and part production journal, this paper examines the inspirations, influences, and decisions behind A Late Thaw.
Open Access
Halfling
(2015-08-29) Fissenden, Emma Louise Jane; Rickard, Marie Y.
Halfling is a feature length screenplay following Azra, a young girl who embarks on a journey across a dystopian future-land to protect her people and ask for help from the Grim, a people she has been taught are monsters.
Open Access
Absence is Present
(2015-08-29) Paskaljevic, Vladimir; Barta, Tereza
Absence Is Present is a short film about emotional aspects of immigration. It’s a story about two women: a daughter in Canada and a mother in Serbia. The daughter (Jelena), who is a young immigrant with a degree in Economics, seeks an appropriate job in Canada. As she does not have any “Canadian experience” she has to work in all kinds of menial jobs. This is mainly why Jelena’s mother Rada is reluctant of the idea of her daughter being an immigrant. The film begins when Rada faints on a street and loses the family dog Srećko. Throughout the she struggles with corrupted Serbian health care system while she searches for the dog throughout city of Belgrade. The purpose of this thesis paper is to examine creative process over the course of making the short film Absence Is Present.
Open Access
Slumber Party
(2015-12-16) Paz, Maya; Barta, Tereza
Slumber Party is a short film about the constant struggle between expectation and reality. Over the course of one, meaningful night, Libby realizes that everything she had been waiting for was not what she expected, and that in order to start living, she needs to let her expectations, and her past, go.
Open Access
Aum, She Who is Most Auspicious
(2015-12-16) Dillon-Davis, Julia Kate Elizabeth; Buchbinder, Amnon
Light seekers. Familial secrets. And parentified children. AUM, SHE WHO IS MOST AUSPICIOUS is a coming-of-age screenplay about what it means to care for others – and for our selves. On the morning she expects to leave for Europe to pursue music studies, 17-year-old Elise Lichten wakes to find her plane ticket gone – and her mother, too. It’s not the first time. As daughter to guru-seeking Paula, Elise and her sister Lily are used to their mother’s spiritual malaise and unannounced retreats at ashrams overseas. Elise is beyond ready to be free of her family. She has to find a place for her little sister to stay till their mother returns. At first, 17-year-old Gavin Cahill’s adoration for Elise comes with a family – a stable family – for Elise to entrust her sister. But when she begins to warm to his affections, she opens to a world she’s adamantly rejected: one of spiritual devotion, non-duality and an assuredness in the divine. Soon, she loses sight of her dream to study music and finds a new dream in Gavin. But their love comes at a cost: their relationship reveals long-hidden family secrets. When Paula returns, distant and vulnerable, Elise has to decide what she cares for most – and what she’s willing to lose in order to stand unapologetically in who she is. Combining research in storytelling, feminine psychology, and archetypes and mythology, AUM is a heroine’s journey about a young girl’s descent to the underworld and auspicious return.
Open Access
Return
(2015-12-16) Rotenberg, Aaron Gershon; Longfellow, Brenda
Return is an experimental documentary framing a search for home amidst displacement. Through personal travel footage, family interviews, archival photography and collected clips from Palestine/Israel, the work interrogates how movement frames the idea of home. Through unearthing the cycles of displacement, the film intends to bring up the question of “What remains outside the frame?” when we conceive of home. The work contains five meditations on home including (1) a reflection on early European photography in Palestine, (2) Travel footage from a visit to the filmmaker's former homes in Palestine/Israel, (3) a family interview, (4) a prayer for seeing beyond walls and (5) a journey to a park built on the ruins of destroyed Palestinian villages. Return is an exploration of margins and frames in an attempt to get to a broader understanding of the boundaries “home”.
Open Access
Our Father
(2015-12-16) Valle, Daniel; Longfellow, Brenda
Our Father is a fictional short film that tells a story of two women—a mother (Mira, 53, an immigrant from Croatia) and her daughter (Emily, 30, a born Canadian)— who are trying to set aside their differences while traveling to the cemetery where Mira’s deceased husband and Emily’s father is buried. Various disputes happen during their time in the car: the daughter’s lack of interest in visiting the grave of her father regularly, Emily’s (in her mother’s view) masculinized appearance, their differing views on death and religion, and the mother’s strict and unforgiving attitude towards life. The main conflict arises when the mother realizes that Emily failed to buy a proper set of flowers, thus exhibiting a lack of understanding and commitment to preserving the tradition of godišnjica (a yearly visit to the grave of a deceased relative). After enduring the pain of revisiting their pasts and dealing with their ongoing interpersonal conflicts, Mira and Emily end their visit to the cemetery with an unsettling feeling that their differences will never be alleviated. The last exchange of words between them, in which Mira sends out a prayer to God in Croatian (uttering a full sentence in her native language for the first time during the film), and Emily does not understand her, hints that their oppositions might have an additional level of complexity. As they leave the cemetery, life goes back to ‘normal’, the birds start chirping and Mira and Emily go back to their every-day talk, hinting that the conflicts between them will keep reemerging over and over again, specially during the yearly godišnjica.
Open Access
Sing for Me
(2015-12-16) Waham, Sama; Longfellow, Brenda
"Sing For Me" is a contemplation of the notion of belonging, connecting with heritage in the form of an inherited nostalgia, while investigating the viewpoint of fractured diasporic identities and ethnic solidarity, and meditating on a fading ancient practice that sends its roots back to the depth of Babylonian history. A personal reflexive lens that departs from loss and follows a river to meet Baghdad, the film travels through shared family memory, a collage of stories and old footage that provide a glimpse of Iraq’s modern history and its defeated dreams of a modern and just society, broken by decades of severe dictatorship that have led to a culture of violence, ongoing genocides and religious extremism. The journey is guided by a familiar voice from the past, found on an old audiotape in an abandoned box, to a new exposition of ‘home’.
Open Access
Pride Denied
(2016-09-20) Chisholm, Kami; Greyson, John R.
Largely shot during World Pride in Toronto in June 2014, Pride Denied is a political essay documentary that explores the stakes of contemporary LGBT politics, organizations, and celebrations. In particular, Pride Denied traces the transformation of contemporary pride events from activist roots to large, corporate-sponsored events that actively displace street-based folks such as sex workers and the homeless/underhoused. Pride Denied also looks at how state governments and corporations increasingly invoke rhetorics of LGBT inclusion to proffer a progressive image of themselves a practice known as pinkwashing in order to distract attention from imperial wars, settler colonialism, environmental destruction, and other human rights abuses. Lastly, the film explores how LGBT movements and organizing on issues such as marriage primarily address the interests of wealthy LGBT people while largely ignoring the needs of everyone else especially people of color, transgender folks, and non-citizens. Pride Denied addresses these topics and more though interviews, event footage, and archival research. The film primarily targets audiences at post-secondary educational institutions as well as queer and trans community activists.
Open Access
Shadow of the Headframe
(2016-09-20) Lean, Victoria Brigitte; Kazimi, Ali
Shadow of the Headframe is a feature length essay film that paints a complex portrait of the Attawapiskat First Nation a place that is a homeland for some, and a new frontier for others. In the shadow of a De Beers diamond mine, the remote indigenous community lurches from crisis to crisis, while facing eroding treaty rights and an inability to directly benefit from resource revenues. Filmed over five years, Shadow of the Headframe follows Attawapiskats journey from obscurity and into the international spotlight during the protest movement, Idle No More. Weaving together great distances, intimate everyday scenes, and archive images, the documentary chronicles the First Nations fight for awareness and justice in the face of repeated attempts to thwart their demands. This supporting document provides insight into the films theoretical foundations, production process, and creative treatment, as well as background information on the historical and socioeconomic context.
Open Access
Life with John
(2016-09-20) Labik, Michal; Barta, Tereza
Life with John is a 15-minute fiction film about a married couple, Peter and Elena, whose lives are disturbed when Peter's imaginary friend John comes to stay in their small apartment. Having hosted similar visitors in the past, Elena decides to play along and pretends that John is real. However, as John's stay prolongs itself, the lines between what's real and what's imaginary begin to blur, until the point where Elena begins to doubt her own sense of reality. The film combines elements of dark comedy and psychological thriller to explore ideas around the differences in people's perceptions of reality, but also around long-term relationships and alienation from self. Life with John aims to be a battlefield of perceptions, one that illustrates how mental differences lead to people inhabiting very different worlds.
Open Access
Juha the Whale
(2016-09-20) Masri, Karam Al; Greyson, John R
Juha the Whale is a short coming-of-age fiction film that explores the isolation a refugee mother and her young daughter face as they await the status of their claimant hearing in Toronto, Canada. Najah (45) and her daughter Noor (8), spend the days leading up to their hearing in cramped refugee housing, awaiting the verdict, which will determine whether they can remain in Canada or be deported back to war-torn Syria. The story is told through fragmented scenes, conveying a lost sense of time as the hours blend together. Striking visuals capture the alienation of their cramped apartment, while fleeting snapshots of bustling city life from their small bedroom window emphasize their isolation. This domestic reality is juxtaposed with Noors disjointed auditory memories of her father as she struggles to mentally cope with war-related trauma. Through these creative elements, Juha the Whale seeks to authentically portray the complex and desperate experiences of a broken family caught between hope and despair.