Vf Fil

The 2021 Academy Award nominees for Best Documentary (Short Subject).

Visual accompaniment to The Alchemist's 2018 EP, Bread.

Some time ago, Robert took some photos of military action which are now endangering his life. He is on the run from those who would find their publication damaging and is headed for Syria, where he believes he will be safe. While in Istanbul, he meets a pop singer, a woman half his age who gives him the erotic charge of his life. He begins taking film of their bedroom encounters and says some pretty excessive things about how marvelous she is to him. Meanwhile, his local friends don't trust or like him enough to help him stay in Istanbul, and it seems that he will have to continue onward in his journey to safety.

Bob Branaman, most known for his painting, has been working with an 8mm camera for years, has produced a dozen films or so, which he rather simply and beautifully refuses to name, all involving multiple super-impositions (all created camera-wise) with much flash frame happening (or what he would, if he created them editing-wise, call extremely rapid cutting) and of a natural Baroque-musical tempo and which created for me a whole new sense of film collage. (The Film-Makers' Cooperative)

Cultural historian Janina Ramirez presents a collection of intriguing and exciting short films by emerging women directors and artists. Each film gives a female perspective on modern-day topics from body image and new love to grief and belonging. Expect honest and refreshing storytelling that will make you laugh, make you cry and make you think.

Saget’s short film is a precursor to his subsequent successful career as a stand-up comedian. In the film, he projects himself as a successful art-house filmmaker, like Bergman or Fellini, and proceeds to poll passing pedestrians about their knowledge of the “famous” local filmmaker, Bob Saget.

Being brought up by deaf parents did not hinder director Malcolm Venville. Instead, it opened his eyes to a whole new world of vivid images. Silent Film is an 11-minute film documenting his parents' romance.

Strung together with a series of separate scenes, this film has only one focus and that is the brief period of adjustment when a young student arrives at school, fixes up his room, writes letters to his girlfriend, meets her many times in his room, and then brings a horse into his room. There seems to be no special point to these 90 minutes of sequences, and even the horse seems to wonder what he is doing there.

A film in 13 parts.

"The film may suggest the fear of losing a loved one. Desire. Yearning. Anger. Doubt. A female nude. A reiterated breast. A child with a bicycle. The dead stump of a great tree. A blood- red sundown sky. A stick washed back and forth by the sea. And also, near the ending, an old 'Rhythm and Blues' song in which the male voice sings of his fear that he may lose his beloved. He finally closes with 'I wonder …if we’ll ever be…married…..I sometimes wonder…if you still love me?…. or if you’ve let me go?'. I use multiples of several shots. Perhaps it gives a feeling that life is both always the same and yet never the same? I superimpose different material over those shots each time, so that the actual imagery and their impact are always different. It challenges, perhaps, the well known French observation that 'Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose'." –Abbott Meader

Short film set in a castle.

The story is from the perspective of a young woman, Molly, as she goes about her daily working routine, always wishing for the comfort and quiet of home.

Part one starts with an overview of the prehistory of moving images in the 19th Century: Zoetrope, Phenakistiscope, Chronophotagraphy etc. until the invention of the Cinematograph and Kinetograph/Kinetoscope. The second part will be devoted to the Brothers Lumiere following 20 of their amazing documentaries between 1895 to 1905. The third part is a new interpretation of A TRIP DOWN MARKET STREET, San Francisco 1906.

In an empty world, a solitary woman mechanically follows the protocols of a factory hog farm. Her labours are sporadically punctuated by musical rhapsodies as she moves toward the impending end. Is it the end of the world, a program malfunction, or the beginning of a film?

This short film brings together animated interpretations of four poems by great Canadian wordsmiths: "Riverdale Lion" by John Robert Colombo, "A Kite Is a Victim" by Leonard Cohen, "Klaxon" by James Reaney and George Johnston’s "The Bulge."