Aerlyn Weissman

Movies

In Particular, Barbara Findlay
Editor
Over the last 30 years, barbara findlay has brought together the forces of feminism, anti-oppression and community activism, advocating for the rights and freedoms of queer and transgender Canadians.
Beyond Gay: The Politics of Pride
Writer
Over the course of a year, film follows Vancouver Pride Society president Ken Coolen to various international Pride events, including Poland, Hungary, Russia, Sri Lanka and others where there is great opposition to pride parades. In North America, Pride is complicated by commercialization and a sense that the festivals are turning away from their political roots toward tourism, party promotion and entertainment. Christie documents the ways larger, more mainstream Pride events have supported the global Pride movement and how human rights components are being added to more established events. In the New York sequence, leaders organize an alternative Pride parade, the Drag March, set up to protest the corporatization of New York Pride. A parade in São Paulo, the world's largest Pride festival, itself includes a completely empty float, meant to symbolize all those lost to HIV and to anti-gay violence.
Little Sister's vs. Big Brother
Writer
This documentary, filmed over a 10-year period, centers on the debate over censorship as it follows Vancouver's Little Sister's Bookstore and its 20-year struggle with Canada Customs over the seizure of books. In the face of bigotry, bombings and repeated book seizures, it wages the most important legal battle in history against Canada Customs.
Little Sister's vs. Big Brother
Director
This documentary, filmed over a 10-year period, centers on the debate over censorship as it follows Vancouver's Little Sister's Bookstore and its 20-year struggle with Canada Customs over the seizure of books. In the face of bigotry, bombings and repeated book seizures, it wages the most important legal battle in history against Canada Customs.
Homeboys
Director
A preview of Aerlyn Weissman's unfinished documentary on gay men living in rural British Columbia.
Fiction and Other Truths: A Film About Jane Rule
Director
Documentary profile of writer Jane Rule whose literary career produced a wealth of novels and journalistic pieces which, in the face of Canadian censorship, speak eloquently about the lives of lesbians and gay men.
Restricted Entry: Censorship on Trial
Director
A summary of the anti-censorship dialogue which supported Vancouver store Little Sisters' ten year challenge to homophobic bureaucracy.
Forbidden Love: The Unashamed Stories of Lesbian Lives
Director
Ten women in Canada talk about being lesbian in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s: discovering the pulp fiction of the day about women in love, their own first affairs, the pain of breaking up, frequenting gay bars, facing police raids, men's responses, and the etiquette of butch and femme roles. Interspersed among the interviews and archival footage are four dramatized chapters from a pulp novel, "Forbidden Love".
Strand, Under the Dark Cloth
Sound
Although his influence on the history of photography has been nothing short of profound, Paul Strand (1890-1976) remains a curiously shrouded and paradoxical figure. While passionately devoted to humanity, he was happiest in the isolation of the dark room. A pioneer filmmaker (Manhatta, Native Land, Heart of Spain, The Wave), he found the process of collaboration painful. Strand established himself in New York in the 1920's as a master of light and structure, with his now famous photo of Wall Street inspired by the forms and movement of European modernist painters such as Matisse and Picasso. His closeup portraits and landscapes were equally profound. John Walker's Strand.
A Winter Tan
Director
Jackie Burroughs stars as Maryse Holder, the ill-fated feminist author who met an untimely death in Acapulco. Her attitude of cultural and racial condescension toward Mexican men was to regard them as nothing more than beasts of burden for her own sexual pleasure, and her hedonistic pursuits of sex and drugs led to her death at the hands of one of her many boytoys.
Calling the Shots
Sound
Documentary about women in the film industry. Numerous notable actresses and female directors share their thoughts.