Stories Sarah Tells

Some of life's little obstacles that get in the way of a girl and what she really wants: to do her work.

Rosie Ming, a young Canadian poet, is invited to perform at a Poetry Festival in Shiraz, Iran, but she’d rather be in Paris. She lives at home with her over-protective Chinese grandparents and has never been anywhere by herself. Once in Iran, she finds herself in the company of poets and Persians, all who tell her stories that force her to confront her past; the Iranian father she assumed abandoned her and the nature of Poetry itself. It’s about building bridges between cultural and generational divides. It’s about being curious. Staying open. And finding your own voice through the magic of poetry. Rosie goes on an unwitting journey of forgiveness, reconciliation, and perhaps above all, understanding, through learning about her father’s past, her own cultural identity, and her responsibility to it.

animated short

In Ann Marie Fleming's 'Pioneers of X-Ray Technology' (a film about Grandpa), super-8 home movies are only one part of the film's cooly complex structure. The first time I saw 'Pioneers' it looked like an uncomplicated portrait of Fleming's grandfather, Dr. Ernest To, who was a photographer, amateur filmmaker and Hong Kong radiologist. On second viewing, the film's ambivalence towards its subject becomes clear.

You Take Care Now, an early student film, is a perfect exemplar of Ann Marie Fleming's idiosyncratic vision and stands as one of her signature works. Made on 16mm, and incorporating found footage, original material, animation, and processed images (Vancouver's groundbreaking avant-garde cinema of the 1970s is a decided influence here), Fleming's film offers a visually dazzling, emotionally wrenching, oddly humorous account of two profound personal traumas.

A French artist struggling to put the finishing touches on his masterpiece finds his concentration repeatedly broken by the unusual sounds emanating from his neighbor's apartment in this black comedy from Ann Marie Fleming. Immediately discharged from the hospital following her hastily executed brain surgery, Elizabeth Murray wanders the streets in a curious haze, her personality visibly affected by the botched cerebral procedure. Upon spotting the man of her dreams wandering along the beach in a similarly confused manner, Elizabeth lovingly brings the disoriented man back to her apartment in hopes of nursing him back to health. Following an allergic reaction to her environment that forces Elizabeth to wrap her entire apartment in plastic, a bloody mishap with her new beau quickly spirals into a murderous, and quite noisy, rampage of good intentions gone horribly awry.

Old Dog shows how elderly dogs' lives are improved by technology - from diapers for amputees to doggie strollers - through animated vignettes. The soundtrack consists of an older man describing his dog's ailments and what he does to care for them. Clearly, he could be talking about himself.

This short probes the taboos around a very particular second-hand trauma, leading us to a more universal understanding of human experience.

A group of Syrian women, refugees recently resettled in Canada, are negotiating life in their new home. They have some questions.

Waving was made after her grandmother's sudden death of an aneurysm. A poetic monologue drafts the film's narrative, the filmmaker's voice impelling a succession of images drawn from a lifetime of family. Her text hinges on an identification with her grandmother that begins as an infant and carries on into adulthood. "I was just like granny" she says but goes on to hint of a compact too closely drawn--of a bodily sympathy that relates the ills of one generation to the next. Their common ailments join the bodies of young and old beneath the sign of mortality, sharing the certainty of a body's failure.