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Echoes in the Rink: The Willie O'Ree Story is a documentary on the triumphal life story of the first Black player in the National Hockey League. Like Jackie Robinson in professional baseball, O'Ree faced many obstacles to achieving his dream; but unlike Robinson, his achievement would go unnoticed for forty years.

Interview with Canadian dancer-choreographer William Douglas, who discusses his struggle to come to terms with AIDS, and his awareness of the disease's potential effects upon his life and art. Speaking from Montréal and his family's vacation home in Nova Scotia, he looks back upon his work as a choreographer, noting the impact Merce Cunningham's choreography has had upon him, and tracing the development of his own style. He talks about his love of dancing and teaching dance, and how this love has helped him transcend his fears for the future. His partner José Navas also contributes to the discussion. Excerpts from Douglas's works Anima, we WEre WARned, and Thorn are intercut with the interview.

A friendly message brought to you by Westcoast Lesbians.

When a group of Quebec farmers organizes to travel halfway around the world to spend time with peasants and farm workers in the Philippines, strong ties of international solidarity and mutual understanding result.

Lahoot is an Islamic mythological term for the world beyond the corporeal existence. In a stylized, formalist illustration of dreams, memories and realities.

A bold and eclectic cinematic style defines the work of filmmaker Michka Saäl and her friend, writer Nadine Ltaif as they journey from childhoods in the Middle East to their chosen home of Montréal. Saäl is Jewish, Ltaif is Arab. Together they overcome the divisive prejudices of their upbringing and embark on an engaging search for clarity, familiarity and historical significance among the immigrant communities of Montréal. Saäl uses super-8 home movies, old photographs, dramatizations and casual conversations to cross personal and political boundaries, giving voice to the varied ancestries of us all.

The competition for tourist dollars is desperate! There has to be a new spin on how to entice tourists to our poverty stricken province of Nova Scotia. This film animation develops a landscape that any death wish would appreciate.

A chance encounter at a Tim Horton's in downtown Winnipeg brought filmmaker, Barry Gibson and psychic, David Pandorra together. Pandorra, looking for an audience for his demonstrations, found in Gibson a skeptic about psychic phenomenon, but a believer in chasing a dream. A Question of Reality is a virtual frantic monologue as Pandora attempts to demonstrate the reality of psychic phenomenon. Success and failure at cards and a link to UFO's underscore a desperate effort to be as famous as Uri Geller. Gibson shows the audience a warm and humorous account of life in pursuit of a dream.

Philip and Jodie meet under an unsettling coincidental circumstance. They both evoke the past to better understand their present reunion. Once more, in the future, by chance they come across each other's paths. This time they understand that it is no longer a coincidence but yet their destiny.

Go Dyke! Go! is a humorous commentary on lesbian relationships in the context of children’s literature. Taking off from the popular children’s book Go Dog! Go! (by P.D. Eastman), this animation paints a sarcastic, pointed and comic picture of queer life in the 90s. Familiar pop imagery and everyday signifiers are a point of entry for a discussion of the patterns of serial monogamy and lesbian representation. Go Dyke! Go! plays with the genre of animation and poses a game of semiotics to deconstruct the tropes of children's books and heterosexism.

Naked male body meets crumbling brick wall... in an embrace?

Interference continues the filmmaker's experimentation with time and stillness. A woman sits at her desk typing. Outside, the Canadian winter holds the land in its grip. Snow flurries drift past the window. The woman makes coffee, waits for the mail to arrive, sits in thought. We wait for the disaster to strike. At the end of the day, another woman enters the apartment and asks how the day went. The end. The accumulation of non-events gradually strips us of all the clichés of dramatic action, and we are made aware that our actual lives are always like this.

Mountain Bike video instruction with Bruce Spicer : Bruce shows you how to ride gnarly singletrack, navigate switchbacks, launch big drops, hurdle obstacles and ride steeps, plus much more!

Fishing communities in Newfoundland struggle in the wake of the 1992 Atlantic Cod Moratorium and dwindling fish populations.

Terminal Lunch is the story of Red Braid, a young delinquent overcome with guilt as he flees from a parking lot mugging gone awry. When he tries to leave on the next train out of town, he discovers the man sitting near him at the terminal's lunch counter is a serial killer. The unexpected encounter puts a kink in his plans and thrusts him into a potentially dangerous moral dilemma. Should he risk exposing his own crimes to stop the killer, or should he live with the guilt of letting a madman go free?

A short film about lesbians’ obsession with love and marriage. Using colourful imagery and an ironic voice-over, Bradley creates a playful and hilarious look at this popular cliché within the lesbian community.

Homebelly combines waking dreams with unsettling fragments of this and that. An icy soundscape is set to a live-action animated drama featuring a sleeping body and a persistant rock.

A haunting, experimental narrative that merges the roaming voice of a battered wife with popular images of women to question the conventional ideology of representation and the denial of domestic violence. Alternating between provocative poetry and submissive prose, the voice echoes terrifying thoughts of the abused woman while gradually deconstructing - and reconstructing- manipulated found footage.

Interviews with five drag queens about making it big in a small town.

Shot at the Pierre Boucher Hospital in Montreal, this film takes us into the emergency room to see how our healthcare system is holding up. What it reveals is a powerful indictment of management that sees only the bottom line while human lives are at stake.

A gay skateboarder collides with the straight adult world of big cars and suburban dads.

Using a Super8 camera, Henricks employed time-lapse photography to document the interior and exterior of his apartment. Inspired by the work of Virginia Woolf, this video uses writing as a metaphor to examine temporality and impermanence. Time Passes is part a series of works that explores one of the principle metaphors of video: the window.

The dinosaurs were headed for trouble. They ate nothing but junk food. They never brushed their teeth. They stayed up all night. And though they loved jumping off cliffs, they didn't like the landings much. The early mammals tried to warn them. "Keep that up and you'll all be extinct!" they said. But the dinosaurs just laughed... and over time, they evolved into birds.

The Other Side is a twenty minute video examining the issues that people face when someone close to them has had a stroke. Five different caregivers talk about the issues and emotional decisions they had to make, their struggles and their triumphs. A short but intimate film which strikes a chord with anyone who has faced this challenge. This provocative piece reveals the highest of the highs and the lowest of the lows but the final compassionate message it delivers is one of hope.

An homage to Canadian structural film and video of the 1970s and 1980s, as well as a clever critique of capitalism and colonialism, Reading Canada Backwards subtly folds the romance of the Intercolonial Railway back onto questions of entitlement, landownership, and the right to freedom of movement.

Witnessed is inspired from the dance piece Courtyard choreographed by Allen Kaeja. Allen delves into the times his family lived through during the Holocaust of WW II, by exploring the relationships of five individuals after months of forced confinement inside the Ghetto walls. The story of Witnessed is one of displacement, unrelenting fear and community support in a time of crisis.

Balifilm was originally commissioned as a stage performance, created from diary images and sounds collected in 1990 and 1992 by Peter Mettler on the island of Bali. The soundtrack is a live recording of eight Gamelan musicians playing the bronze and wooden instruments of Indonesia during the projection of the film. balifilm is a personal, lyrical observation and expression of the creative pulse of an extraordinary culture.

How does a woman’s body move? skin•es•the•si•a scrambles the cultural codes of female movement by juxtaposing images from the work of performance artist Hannah Sim with images of Sim working as a nude dancer in a peep show. It explores the rapport between one woman’s body and two performance environments. How are women perceived and typed through our own physical movements? What might a response of power to these codes and norms look like? What do we discover by embracing our otherness, by transforming it into a means of confronting the world?

A summary of the anti-censorship dialogue which supported Vancouver store Little Sisters' ten year challenge to homophobic bureaucracy.

A one-minute vignette on renowned neurosurgeon Dr. Wilder Penfield's pioneering procedure to cure epilepsy.

Contemplating suicide, a young gay man is heartbroken over his lost love.

Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, is a small steel town on Lake Superior. Bob Goddere is an openly gay man who has lived there for years and hosts dances for the local gay and lesbian community in his basement. This is his story and the story of what gay-life in one small Canadian town is like.

In making this piece, Bourque literally distorted the personal home movie images appearing on the film plane through various manipulations in the process of doing her own low-tech contact printing. The point of contact in printing is continuously shifted so that the film plane appears warped and the images fluctuate, creating a distorted space of fleeting apparitions, like resurfacing memories.

Nu•tka• utilizes image bifurcation to explore the history of colonialization on Vancouver Island, where English and Spanish fleets battled over trade routes in the 18th century. Films of the landscape—the only imagery shown—are superimposed on one screen so that the footage appears doubled. This formal effect is echoed by the soundtrack, which includes excerpts from the sea captains’ diaries, which become increasingly paranoid and irrational. At key moments in the narrative all visual and verbal elements meld together in exquisite clarity.

A Parable in Black and White examines the nature and breadth of prejudice as seen through the eyes of two hobos, one black and the other white. What happens while they are out on a walk one day leads to an understanding that despite our differences, we are all human.

This documentary takes you on a reflective journey into the extended family of Nova Scotia’s Mi'kmaq community. Revisiting her own roots, Mi'kmaq filmmaker and mother Catherine Anne Martin explores how the community is recovering its First Nations values, particularly through the teachings of elders and a collective approach to children-rearing. Mi'kmaq Family is an inspiring resource for both Indigenous and non-Indigenous audiences who are looking for ways to strengthen and explore their own families and traditions. We hear the Mi'kmaq language spoken and a lullaby is sung by a Mi'kmaq grandmother featured in the film.

The myths of the priapic Black stud and the White woman beauty ideal collide in this rhythmically constructed work about identity and desire. Skinned explores the specific historic, psychological and social implications of relationships between Black men and White women. Using their bodies as a point of juncture, the artists blatantly situate the viewer as voyeur while identifying this physical realm as the arena within which cultural communities and individuals oppose interracial relationships. Ultimately, the multiplicity of images and voices calls into question the validity of definitive truths and the authoritative voice.

In the dark winter of 1995, Linda Giles, a Victoria-based installation artist, had a show at the old XChanges Gallery on North Park Street, in Vancouver. Before the show came down, Suzy Raxlen donned her black tutu and inked her sensitive hands with the printers ink that she plied in her trade as a master printer. She moved through the gallery of white veils, acting out a minimalist dance of thwarted desire, repression and frustration...

The life and times of George Johnston, photographer and keeper of memories for the Tlingit nation.

"This two-part video is a newcomer’s portrait of Montréal. I spent my first winter in Québec in a cold, dark, first floor apartment. I sat in the kitchen beside the electric heater, drinking coffee while watching the electric meter, wondering how I would pay my bills. At night, I looked at the illuminated “Q” on the Hydro Québec building and imagined how much it cost to keep it lit. In the second section, a man looks for meaning in the tile patterns of the Champ-de-Mars metro station. I took his search to an end more absurd than anything I could hope to enact. The moral of these two tales is: “Don’t lose you sense of humour”. It’s from this cliché that the video derives its title." - Nelson Henricks

A wryly humorous excavation of history and personal memory, Moose Jaw is a reflexive view of the filmmaker’s childhood town in the Canadian west, as a mythic symbol of nation-building and the ‘manifest destiny’ of North America. With its revitalization motto, ‘There’s a Future in Our past,” this post-colonial crash site ingests the filmmaker in its museumizing process as a once thriving rail head on the margins of (British) Empire.

A translator of Russian origin living in France, André Markowicz undertook the task of retranslating the complete works of Dostoyevsky in 10 years. Considered one of the greatest translators of our time and highly sought after by the most eminent stage directors, he is a controversial figure in the areas of translation and theatre. Markowicz is a pioneer, in that he has introduced the notion of rendering the “voice” of the work, which had never been done before.

A reclusive performer grants an interview on the eve of his retirement from the stage.

The video Quest for History, is a quest for self knowledge. This presentation is a sampler of a much larger story which opens avenues for further research. It brings together personal stories, interviews, history, and memories. These fragments of interwoven conversations of aunts, uncles, sisters and cousins reveal their common link to two brothers who, in the 19th century, went in search of a transition from slave legacy to effectuate self-sufficiency. Through capturing the oral stories and weaving them together with her personal experience of life and travel the video expresses the tapestry of identity of one person and yet this work transfers to the viewer, a shared experience.

Laugh In the Dark takes us into the heart of “queer family values” with an odd little wagon train of “six fags, two dykes and an old lady” who pull into the dilapidated town of Crystal Beach, Ontario in the early l980s. The “boys” dream of restoring this former resort town to its earlier glory, with a twist. They open a B&B, and stage lavish cabarets, complete with lip synching drag queens, to raise money for early AIDS awareness.

A claymation skater-boy love story that swings.

Playwright Sky Gilbert interviews his rather over-the-top drag alterego, Jane. The original version was commissioned but rejected by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC).

Every evening, Eugène Fortin becomes Madame Simone, to the delight of club-goers around town. His flamboyant costumes, a pastiche of many styles, give him the look of a clown from the end of the last century. One day, Madame Simone hears a voice urging him to go to the Wigstock festival in New York: a gathering dear to both transvestites and wig fans.

"bright and dark" uses poetry to create a personal narrative about the dynamics of love, light and bodies.

A plan to herd reindeer across Alaska to aid Canadian Inuit gets bogged down in logistical difficulties and personal baggage.

This video addresses the complex and rich cultural history inherited by the children of immigrants. While official History is often presented as a single truth, "truth" is multi-layered and multi-valent. Through a layering of stories from Italian immigrants, images from Super 8 family films, and remembrances of my grandmother, "America il Paradiso" seeks to express the complexity of history.

Every year, l'Association des Transsexuels-les du Québec organizes, in collaboration with Café Cléopatre, an evening of transsexual pride. Entitled "Journée Internationale de la Transsexualité," the event is an opportunity for several generations of transsexual women to get together, recognize the involvement of many in their community and pay tribute to individuals who figure importantly in their history.

Welcome to Africville gives voice to what may have been marginalized members of an Afro-Canadian community in 1969. It's intention is to be a catalyst to thought and reflection about the lives and struggles of people from that community whose stories still go untold. It is the fictional account of a family. We listen to the stories of three generations of women and their friend Julius on the day their community is to be destroyed by the municipal government of Halifax. This story is a portrait of four individuals coping with universal uncertainties and insecurities.

A claymation animated short created by Sandra Law

Shot during three seasons, Kenuajuak's documentary tenderly portrays village life and the elements that forge the character of his people: their history, the great open spaces and their unflagging humour. Though Kenuajuak appreciates the amenities of southern civilization that have made their way north, he remains attached to the traditional way of life and the land: its vast tundra, the sea teeming with Arctic char, the sky full of Canada geese. My Village in Nunavik is an unsentimental film by a young Inuk who is open to the outside world but clearly loves his village. With subtitles.

Chauvinist pig photographer and part-time pornographer Donnie Goodman gets transferred to another dimension where a group of beautiful alien women show him the errors of his ways in this Montreal shot sci-fi thriller.

A slice of life among the creatures of the earth. The word microbe comes from the Greek “mikrobios”, which means “ whose life is short”.