Film And Video

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https://hdl.handle.net/10315/26545

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Open Access
Butch
(2023-03-28) Lam, Loritta Lokchi; Longfellow, Brenda
“Butch” is a 7-minute romantic comedy following the trials of Butch, a large left boob who struggles with his masculinity, as he works to impress his new crush in unfortunately toxic ways. Butch may or may not end up getting the girl, but in trying he goes through anxiety, humiliation, and a transcendental experience. Shot entirely on green screen with an iPhone and animated to within an inch of its life using scraps from the internet, this film examines the tensions of normative transmasculinity from the perspective of one of its exiled subjects, the breast.
Open Access
Each Brain
(2023-03-28) Hodgson, Elizabeth Alexandra; Evans, Barbara
Each Brain is a 21-minute alternative documentary featuring an interabled and collaborative approach to filmmaking with subjects, Hana Kujawa and Melanie Taddeo-Nxumalo, both experienced profound acquired disability in early adulthood. The film’s central themes are creative collaboration and reframing the experience of disability. Departing from a classic talking head style documentary, Each Brain explores Hana and Melanie’s experience through original abstract visuals, curated stock footage and archival pieces provided by the collaborators themselves. Woven throughout the film is captured audio of an epileptic seizure, soundscapes, recorded letters and poetry as its soundtrack. The result is an immersive film which further explores the lived experience of two women navigating a diagnosis of epilepsy and the perseverance that guides their journeys.
Open Access
Based on a True Story
(2023-03-28) Badkoobeh, Pooya; Becker, Manfred
"Based on a True Story" is a 20-minute minimalist short film set in Tehran, Iran. It is based on the real-life story of an old couple who planned to commit suicide together on March 19, 2007: the woman went through with it, but the man did not. The film’s central theme is life and death. Employing minimalist storytelling and a hybrid of fiction and documentary style, which brings it closer to cinematic realism, the film uses long takes and distant camera placements for a distinctive effect. The film places professional actors in real locations; the script features very little dialogue and long silences, illustrating the characters’ inner lives and allowing the viewer to fill in their background. These devices help the audience to reflect on the story and connect with the characters.
Open Access
Mela Jaloos,(Festival Procession)
(2023-03-28) Qureshi, Muhammad Abdullah; Greyson, John
Mela Jaloos (Translation: Festival Procession, in Urdu) is a 13-minute film that embarks upon a speculative queer Muslim journey of celebration, resistance and protest. Taking a performance-based approach, the film uses poetic, hybrid and dramatic means to present a kaleidoscope of influences that are rooted in Sufi histories, queerness, and life in Lahore, Pakistan. The narrative of the film is centred around a conversation between Mela, Jaloos, and the river Ravi. The three characters come together to discuss and respond to the end of the world, collapsed timelines, and its subsequent impact on the present. What unfolds is a journey and dance of spiritual transgression, opening a cosmos of queer Muslim potentialities and sexuality.
Open Access
Kite
(2023-03-28) Raghupathy, Leena Manimekalai; Longfellow, Brenda
Kite/காத்தாடி is a hybrid film in which Leena turns the lens on herself, become the text, and decodes her search for radical love that can unchain her from the bondage of the past. She improvises to hear the sound of her own voice clearer, to get out of the binary logic of phallocentrism, to wage a solitary struggle against the silencing of her desires, to explore her sexuality and to decolonize her existence. The film weaves episodes from her life where she turn to poetry, dance, movement theater, painting and documentary, battling various emotions from rage to violent delights in order to attempt a poetic approach to gendered trauma, bringing with her both her excitement and trepidation.
Open Access
Slowpokes
(2023-03-28) Laura Grace Gladwell; Ingrid Veninger
“Slowpokes” is a half-hour dramedy series that follows Lane (33), a discouraged comedian-turned-caregiver, and Doug (38), an unfit legal consultant, as they unwittingly bond in the aftermath of heartbreak and death. While Doug grapples with a looming divorce and an overlooked talent, Lane wrestles with her abandoned ambitions and her late mother’s estate—including a coveted home on the Toronto Islands. This show straddles the fuzzy lines between endings and beginnings, tragedy and comedy, and friendship and romance. It’s about dumb luck, weird timing, loss, and grief. And it’s about love—but, like all classic rom-com couples, it takes Lane and Doug a while to realize that.
Open Access
Upstream
(2022-12-14) Liu, Xin; Barta, Tereza
"Upstream" is a 71-minute experimental hybrid fiction film that reflects on a fragmented journey home that blossoms in different spaces and times. "Xin" is the main character of the film, and “Xin” is a wildlife photographer who takes his camera and subjective point of view on a journey from Canada back to his hometown in China. Concurrently, a school of salmon makes the long journey from the Pacific Ocean, thousands of kilometers away, back to the freshwater river where they were born.
Open Access
Rachael & Tom
(2022-12-14) Vukov, Maya Sofia; Barta, Tereza
Rachael & Tom is a narrative short film about Rachael, a teenage girl with a crush on her church youth pastor, who leaves her small town to encounter hook-up culture at university in the big city. Rachael’s experiences come to define her relationships in unintended ways based on her newfound understanding of intimacy. The film explores some of the growing pains and loss of innocence that occur in the transition to adulthood, and the character-defining moments of a young woman’s life.
Open Access
A Sad, Sad Ghost Picking at the Hairs of Their Knuckles
(2022-12-14) Goldkind, Zachary Nathan; Hoffman, Philip J.
A Sad, Sad Ghost Picking at the Hairs of Their Knuckles is a durational fiction film, a three-hour work of self-positioning, a film about an abstract me. However, I do not find it of substance to discuss the faculties of the film itself, but rather the context through which the film was made. Outlining a thesis for which the film can speak — this is of importance. I will not speak for the subjectivity of others, and the film, itself, speaks for my own. Therefore, I ask questions: Can we study formalism through a historical materialist analysis? Can this study open up manners of seeing a dialectical materialist survey of image-linguistics through our era of the cinema? When we speak of affect in the cinema, are we speaking of the narratological relations between diegesis and spectator; or are we speaking of the psychoanalytical evocations that the form of an image holds, as, then, extrapolated by the spectator? What is narrative in the cinema What can it be? What is performance in the cinema? How has the apparatus of a camera shaped its form? What is time in the cinema? Is it not the foundation upon which all else comes? I, here, have a matrix of thoughts and theories and observations that embolden the filmmaker to scrutinize their positionality as an artist and as a labour organizer. A filmmaker’s imagination is more closely tied to the ethics of production than ever before. The responsibility of an artist is that of history, of people, and of temperateness: a respect for oneself, the filmworkers here to help create the work, and the audiences it will be exhibited to. The film, A Sad, Sad Ghost Picking at the Hairs of Their Knuckles cannot be the endpoint of the politic and philosophy present here, but merely a gesture towards a people, the beginning of a process that will unfurl over a lifetime.
Open Access
Unfinished
(2022-12-14) Sukhdev, Shabnam; Becker, Manfred
Unfinished is a 40-minute personal documentary that encapsulates the struggle of a daughter's mental illness as seen through the lens of her mother. Over a series of hospitalizations through involvement of the ‘invisible’ medics treating her daughter, the mother’s frustrating enquiry to understand and untangle the conundrum of her daughter’s mental health condition unfold. The filmmaker-mother critically examines home videos filmed by her during her daughter’s first episode that unravels the family’s genetic archive. She fears that her past films may be a foreshadow of their lived experience.
Open Access
I Thought the World of You
(2022-08-08) Walker, Kurt Tyrone; Hoffman, Philip J.
A virtual love story set in Vancouver, New York, and the dying world of a massively multiplayer online role playing game.
Open Access
Height Markers
(2022-08-08) Noel, Pranay; Green, Laurence Fraser
This paper examines formal conceits and production processes of my 75-minute narrative fiction film, Height Markers. I will focus on the evolution of the films formal identity, through exercises in art cinema narration, on the process of working with actors in a psychologically investigative and improvisational manner, on utilizing the cinematic opportunities present in real locations, and on writing the film in the cutting room. Height Markers follows Neva and her son Aaron, on Aaron's last two days before leaving home, as Aaron seeks closure after a bad break up, and Neva contemplates a life without her son nearby. They are both haunted by memories of Aaron's late father, Ted. The film is an examination of the ever-present role of memory in shaping our perceptions of love and loss and tries to capture a sense of being unable to fully understand those you love the most.
Open Access
Hallway
(2022-03-03) Lee, Samuel Kiehoon; Green, Laurence Fraser
HALLWAY is a 12-minute 360 video that is an investigation into the filmmakers anxiety through episodic depictions of childhood trauma. It draws upon semi-autobiographical elements surrounding childhood trauma and neglect, and the collateral anxieties manifested in adulthood. With the use of life-sized child mannequins, 12-inch action figures, and a computer-generated virtual background, this project explores early childhood experiences of proximate separation that occur when attuned contact between parent and child is lacking or interrupted.
Open Access
I Am Your Ghost
(2022-03-03) Williams, D Lee; Fisher, Caitlin
I Am Your Ghost is a film and digital media work that explores anticipatory grief, death and dying by expressing and visually representing the liminal spaces inhabited by both the dying and surviving members of a family. The project engaged a co-creative process between three generations in an Armenian family and comprises 6 distinct segments that together make a 15-minute film and a media installation that house the films.
Open Access
Father Figures
(2021-11-15) Segura Gonzalez, Tamara Maite; Longfellow, Brenda
Father Figures is a 22-minute autobiographical essay film that reveals the evolution of Segura's relationship with her estranged father, and at the same time, it establishes other men that were instrumental in her upbringing: her grandfather, stepfather, and uncle. The narrative backbone of the story consists of four letters that she wrote to her father at different points in her life 10, 12, 25, and 35. Guided by a strong voice-over, the film is a love letter that follows a non-linear narrative moving back and forth between personal reflection, childhood memories, and present-time interviews with some of her father figures. Ultimately, the film is about coming to terms with her share of toxic masculinity, and at the same time, it is a cinematic documentation of the psychological process of re-parenting herself.
Open Access
My Husband's Wife
(2021-11-15) Koopman, Allison Justine; Wiseman, Howard M.
My Husbands Wife is an 8-part miniseries set in a Christian polygamous cult. The miniseries focuses on Maryline, a prickly young woman who rails against her role as the Cult Leaders sixth wife. When her husband marries again, Maryline finds herself romantically drawn to her new sister-wife, Angellee. Meanwhile, Officer Tali Cooper investigates the cult and is convinced its responsible for a string of disappearances spanning decades, including the disappearance of her cousin. The series examines the importance of autonomy, the dangers and virtues of faith, and the double-edged sword of desire. Inspired by Koopmans own religious upbringing, My Husbands Wife is a unique marriage between the aesthetic of Anne with an E and the urgency of The Handmaids Tale.
Open Access
A Collage Barbarous
(2021-11-15) Zhao, Ruobing; Longfellow, Brenda
A Collage Barbarous is a short experimental film that navigates a voyage of exile and femininity, and drifts towards the embodied experience of traveling between worlds. On a train moving through Sichuan, the traveling actress meets the imaginary. Confused, she struggles with an upcoming performance of a local adaptation of Brecht's The Good Person of Szechwan.
Open Access
Currents / Perpendicolare Avanti
(2021-11-15) Foglia, Federica; Hoffman, Philip J.
Currents / Perpendicolare Avanti is a camera-less, hand-made, 16mm film collage based on Federica Foglia's experience as an immigrant to Canada. The film explores the dynamics of inhabiting the in-between space of multiple countries and temporalities through visual and sound abstraction, interlacing and recycling pre-existing film materials and fragments of otherwise anonymous orphan films. Utilizing these so-called scraps, Currents is a film of extensive remediation, treated by hand through the use of the emulsion lifting technique, thereby re-imagining, re-constructing, and de-constructing the liminality of immigrant life. The re-writing of the self in Currents is produced through the archives of others, via associative montage and repeated performative acts on the surface of the film.
Open Access
The Places We Lived
(2021-11-15) Marchant, Jean-Pierre; Hoffman, Phillip J.
The Places We Lived uses JP Marchants large archive of his parents' Super8 and digital home movies from the mid-1970s to late 1990s to grapple with the hopes, dreams, and disappointments of two South American immigrants who moved to Montreal in the wake of the excitement and optimism generated by Expo 67. This story focuses on his father, Jose ("Pepe"), whose life in Canada followed four hardscrabble decades in Chile. Like his Argentinean-born mother, Pepe's mobile life was characterized by neither chain migration nor lasting social ties with members of his ethnic group. This film is also a story about class, politics, and the complicated histories of migration and exile.
Open Access
Who's Your Guru
(2021-11-15) Alexander, Nicole Alexandra; Wiseman, Howard M.
Forgiveness expert Claire Dupont gets her big break when shes invited to "Whos Your Guru" (the biggest life coach conference of the year) after going viralbut only because she lost her cool when host Jasmine Lee brought up her abusive ex during the interview. Claire must now convince the world and guru Nick Nightingale that shes still the good person she claims if she has a chance of joining the ranks of the coaching elite and help her sons failing business.