Sook-Yin Lee
A documentary discussing the legacy and impact of the famous Crocks N Rolls bar, a music club in Thunder Bay, Ontario that featured many prominent artists throughout the 1980s. Numerous interviewees are profiled, as is the club's legendary founder and owner Frank Loffredo.
The daughter of an overbearing mother enters the rich and strange world of her deceased father — a man she never knew.
WHISPERS AND SHOULDERS An experimental short directed by Sook-Yin Lee Conceived by JOOJ (Lee & Adam Litovitz) Made from the raw footage of JOOJ's 'Shoulders and Whispers' music video, directed by Brandon Cronenberg & filmed by Karim Hussain, CSC. WHISPERS AND SHOULDERS appropriates and reworks the raw footage of JOOJ's 'Shoulders and Whispers' music video. The video's images are rendered voiceless, with figures adrift in suspended animation for a twenty-six minute hypno-poetic reconstruction that draws upon unused images from the original music video. The initial video, 'Shoulders and Whispers,' is a black-and-white three-minute pop-song artifact designed to grab attention with each shot a fixed duration with a slow left-to-right pan. No shot is ever repeated. It has a forward momentum, unfolding new dynamics and imagery; conversely, WHISPERS AND SHOULDERS embraces repetitiveness in richly-saturated colour.
NDP Leader Jack Layton was fluently bilingual, glib, sometimes flashy, full of energy and always media-friendly. He loved to entertain and uplift his co-workers with a strum on his guitar and spirit in his voice (which wasn't particularly good but he sang with gusto). Growing up in a political family, Layton was a left-wing Toronto city councillor for 17 years and spent a year as head of the Federation of Canadian Municipalities. He became leader of the federal New Democratic Party in 2003... The NDP became the Official Opposition for the first time in history. Going into the 2011 federal election... Written by (STAFF)
In a world obsessed with physical supremacy, Three Movements shows the alternative bodybuilding possibilities presented by a cityscape, as Sook-Yin Lee demonstrates her atypical exercise regimen.
YEAR OF THE CARNIVORE is a romantic-comedy-drama about a girl with an unrequited crush on a boy who thinks she's bad in bed, so she goes out to get more 'experience'. SAMMY SMALLS is a 21-year-old tomboy who works as a store detective at Big Apple Food Town. Her job is to deliver shoplifters to her boss who beats them up so they never re-offend. Sammy is head over heels for scruffy street musician EUGENE ZASLAVSKY. He's perfect for her, funny, irreverent and sensitive, but the problem is, he doesn't want to be in a relationship. After a disastrous one-night stand that goes beyond the boundaries of their friendship, Eugene suggests they play the field to get more experience. Following his advice, Sammy hatches a plan catapulting her on a quest that takes her through her neighbours' bedroom, the public swimming pool, and finally to blackmailing shoplifters into giving her sex lessons in the woods behind the supermarket.
Various lives intersect over the course of 48 hours in Canada's largest and most culturally diverse city.
A look at the unusual process used in the making of the film Shortbus (2006) featuring interviews, behind the scenes footage and clips from the feature film. Director John Cameron Mitchell starts with the concept of using real sex in a film with a positive message. The cast of unknowns is selected from homemade audition tapes and then a callback audition workshop. More acting workshops are used to develop the characters and script. The project overcomes a number of obstacles and the rest of the film's development is followed up until its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival.
A group of New Yorkers caught up in their romantic/sexual milieu converge at Shortbus, an underground Brooklyn salon infamous for its blend of art, music, politics, and carnality, and loosely inspired by various underground NYC gatherings that took place in the early 2000s. Here, gay couple Jamie (PJ DeBoy) and James (Paul Dawson) meet Ceth (Jay Brannan), a young ex-model and aspiring singer.
Lydia and her boyfriend, who works in a local café, broke up two months ago. The break up was a turbulent one. But he still has many of his possessions in her house, which are reminders of him to her. The one that she is most disturbed about his his bicycle, which is padlocked to her house. She does whatever she can to break the padlock and thus break any ties she has to him.
A three-paneled look at the worldwide AIDS crisis: in Montreal, a porn actor schemes to pass his mandatory blood test; a young nun makes a personal sacrifice for the benefit of a South African village; in rural China, a black market operative posing as a government-sanctioned blood drawer jeopardizes an entire village's safety
Alessa Woo (Lee) is an ambitious art dealer who meets her match in gifted painter Ben Crowchild (Beach) in this romantic comedy.
Raised a boy in East Berlin, Hedwig undergoes a personal transformation in order to emigrate to the U.S., where she reinvents herself as an “internationally ignored” but divinely talented rock diva, inhabiting a “beautiful gender of one.”
Set in Toronto's Little Italy, Boy Meets Girl stars Sean Astin as Mike, a cynical writer who pens copy for a romance magazine, and Emily Hampshire as Angelina, who has just arrived in Canada from Italy to marry a man she unfortunately doesn't care for. Mike's next door neighbor is an eccentric wallpaper hanger who writes poetry in his spare time. Somehow, one of the paperer's love verses ends up in Angelina's hands and she's convinced Mike wrote it -- and suddenly love is in the air and romance is sparked between them.
Two cops try to solve the murder of a former prostitute while fighting for their jobs in a crime-ridden precinct of a Northwestern city.
A comedy of obsession and assimilation that charts the true account of a first generation Chinese-Canadian's attempt to fit into a white suburb. After an alienated childhood, she lands a job at an unpopular pasta bar, walking the streets as a 10-foot egg noodle. A transformation occurs when her new persona, Mr. Noodle, supersedes her own identity - only to confront a similar alienation as a noodle-human.
Sook-Yin and Dylan are currently holed up in a house in Toronto capturing what happens on consumer cameras and mobile phones. Death and Sickness is a work of auto-fiction inspired by real-life events.
A lonely couple meet in a Laundromat, where their clumsy attempt at a sexual liaison leads to revelations, embarrassments, and a little bit of compassion.
Librarian Miriam Gordon lives in a fog of grief while working amidst marginalized members of the public who populate her downtown public branch. When a burgeoning love-affair with Janko, a younger foreign cab driver coincides with her receiving a series of oddly threatening letters addressed to her, Miriam’s sheltered existence is cracked open.
