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Dandelions

"Lyrical and full of mirth, this filmmaker wonders out loud in her first film: 'How do I make myself at home in a landscape made foreign to me?' Wilkinson looks at her self - black - and ponders in the white landscape called Canada how can she 'enjoy the flowers' as she cartwheels with great panache through fields of them. What kind of relationship to the land can she have in a place where she sees herself but where others constantly ask: Where are you from? Wilkinson's existence vis a vis the land seems to lie somewhere in between the extreme long shots and the close-ups that make up the film, giving at once the feelings of intimacy and estrangement." - Marian McMahon

Dandelions

NR 1995
Too Close for Comfort

Nick, a high school basketball player who is fired from his after-school job at a video store when his boss is informed of his HIV status. As the information spreads, some of Nick's friends immediately reject him because they incorrectly assume that he is gay; however, some of his other friends rally around him and start to work on an educational video about HIV and homophobia, inserting the film's educational component as they interview real people living with HIV about the disease.

Too Close for Comfort

NR 1990
Soho

Soho, an aspiring young woman of about 30, lives on the fringe with all those who, like her, believe that one day they will be a famous writer, a star dancer or a famous director. While waiting for that day, they take up yoga, positive thinking, or various forms of electronic macramé. One hot summer evening, Soho meets 18-year-old Choubie, the other generation with a bright future ahead of her. At 102o, in the shade, in a suburban basement, Soho realizes that she is no longer young, almost poor, and that meditation has not opened the doors of any paradise, even earthly.

Soho

7.0 1994
The Marquesa: Portrait of a Dominatrix

This documentary sets the focus sharply on the often maligned and misunderstood world of sadomasochism. It gives us a glimpse into the life of The Marquesa, a dominatrix who guides us through the S&M community and its rituals and motivations. The Marquesa explores and examines her own relationship to S&M, and to the submissives that make the scenes possible. The video dismantles the myths and fallacies surrounding the practice by a straightforward and frank discussion.

The Marquesa: Portrait of a Dominatrix

NR 1997
Creative Process: Norman McLaren

Norman McLaren was a cinematic genius who made films without cameras, and music without instruments. He produced sixty films in a stunning range of styles and techniques, collecting over 200 international awards, and world recognition. In Creative Process, director Donald McWilliams demystifies the process of artistic creation. Drawing on McLaren's private film vaults, a gold mine of experimental footage and uncompleted films, McWilliams explores McLaren's methods, including his celebrated "pixillation" technique, and his daring forays into animated surrealism.

Creative Process: Norman McLaren

6.7 1990
Shooting Indians: A Journey with Jeffrey Thomas

Spanning over a decade, from 1984 to 1996, Shooting Indians: A Journey with Jeffrey Thomas is an ironic documentary journey full of quiet insights and surprising twists. Starting the film as a foreign student in 1984, Kazimi begins to unravel the hidden history of the land that he has chosen as his home. At one level, Shooting Indians is a portrait of Jeffrey Thomas, an Iroquois photographer. The film explores the influences on his life which led him to his career. It was the work of an American photographer from the turn of the century, Edward Curtis, which forced Thomas to closely examine how Indigenous peoples had been photographed in the past. Thomas views Curtis’ monumental work as a “mountain which must be crossed.” On another level is the irony of an Indian from India making a film on a North American Indian and this is woven throughout the fabric of the film.

Shooting Indians: A Journey with Jeffrey Thomas

8.0 1997
When Strangers Re-Unite

Three Filipino families struggle to rebuild their lives in Canada after years of separation. The third part of a trilogy on the impact of labour migration, including Brown Women Blond Babies and Modern Heroes Modern Slaves.Every year thousands of women enter Canada as domestic servants, the majority of them from the Philippines. Leaving their own children and families behind, they can spend many isolated years cooking, cleaning and caring for others. Sending much of their wages back home, they dream of the day their families can join them.

When Strangers Re-Unite

8.0 1999
Toy Catalogue

John documents part of his extensive collection of cheap, miniature plastic toys by pouring out sorted bags containing them onto a table under the camera, then scattering them to form compositions of colours and textures, paying special attention to certain toys among the masses of them. With a normal shooting speed and in-camera editing, it moves at a fast pace and the toys pile up, but John pushes them aside, and soon makes room for more in the middle. In a recording made on sound film after shooting, or in a live narration, he describes each scene and tells stories to the toys, and sometimes creates “sound effects” with plastic.

Toy Catalogue

NR 1996
Les cheveux en quatre

As much as hair is directly linked to appearance, displaying personality and belonging to a group, it is also intimately linked to being. How many spiritual rites, practiced here as elsewhere, testify to this. The being and the appearance...we are faced with a troubling duality when we know that the hair can affirm, with as much intensity, one as the other. "...it is precisely this duality that I want to illustrate, by cutting of course "Les cheveux en quatre", to evoke as with Les seins dans la tête, fanfasms, obsessions and beliefs related to these parts of the body..." says the director.

Les cheveux en quatre

NR 1996
Another Planet

Cassandra Jones is a young woman from Toronto with a very active imagination and unique view of the world. Feeling trapped by life in her low-income community, and unable to relate to her brother Patrick, a petty criminal, or her overly pious mother, Mary, Cassandra decides to leave Toronto. She applies and is accepted into an exchange program between Quebec and West Africa. When she reaches her Quebec destination, a pig farm, she encounters, Sylvie Leblanc, a woman in need of change, her husband, Luc Leblanc, a man afraid of change and Abdoulaye Diallo, her African exchange counter-part, a man who regrets his decision to seek change. Because none of her expectations are met, Cassandra quickly becomes unhappy on the farm. Her presence creates plenty of tension, much of it humorous. A surprising conclusion comes about after a roller-coaster series of events.

Another Planet

8.0 1999
A Propaganda Model of the Media Plus Exploring Alternative Media

Beginning with Noam Chomsky's response to a college student who role-plays "Jane U.S.A."--someone who naively believes she lives in a democratic society in which she can create her own destiny--the viewer is presented with a cross-section of typically lively Chomsky encounters. Central to a functioning democracy is the necessity of free access to information, ideas and opinions. But what should be our democratic right turns out to be limited and shaped by the biases of insitutions and ideologies within the mass media. Chomsky shows how governments, corporations and other elites manufacture the consent of the public to serve their interests.

A Propaganda Model of the Media Plus Exploring Alternative Media

9.0 1994
Madeline's Rescue

As we know well by now, no one knows better how to frighten Miss Clavel than Madeline. But this time, in the process of clowning around, she almost dies except for the intersession of a very charming dog. This dog, named Miss Genevieve, becomes the hero of the day, taking up residence at the school much to the school trustees' chagrin. Of course, by then, the girls are totally attached to her and there's much sadness when she's forced to leave. But not for long, for soon Miss Genevieve returns with puppies enough to go around.

Madeline's Rescue

NR 1991
Chronicle of a Genocide Foretold

Fifty years after the Holocaust, the world allowed another genocide to take place, this time in Rwanda. In April, 1994 the international community, including the U.S., sat by and watched as 800,000 Tutsi men, women and children were massacred. The killings took place under the eyes of UN peacekeepers. Today, Rwanda remains torn by ethnic killings. Shot over three years, CHRONICLE OF A GENOCIDE FORETOLD follows several Rwandans before, during, and after the genocide.

Chronicle of a Genocide Foretold

9.0 1996
Panic Bodies

"Panic Bodies is a 70-minute, six-part exploration of the ways we experience the body's betrayals: disease, decline and death. The film is a panorama of emotionally charged recollections of strange relatives and estranged siblings, staged recreations of fast-fading pasts and personal mythologies, and reflections on the anxious states created by the body's fragile claims on time and space. It's about being a stranger in your own skin. Panic Bodies perfects the phantom quality of any good work about mourning, but it is not reducible to that. It is also enlivened by the intimacy that comes from having made a spectacle of personal secrets." (Kathleen Pirrie Adams, Xtra)

Panic Bodies

9.0 1998