Director
How can we express the emotional experience of depression and suicide and overcome the stigmas associated with mental health? Sanguedolce’s experimental documentary brings together four artists (including experimental filmmaker Mike Hoolboom), who speak with refreshing honesty about how thoughts of suicide have dominated their personal and creative lives. Shot on 16mm and hand-coloured, the flow of images creates a poetic visual response to the stories presented on the soundtrack and allows space for reflection.
Director
"Vision, in all of its manifestations, permeates the disclosures of the three characters that journey us through the film: Jackie, a lesbian police officer grappling with corroding forces of perception both within and outside her profession; Jamie, for whom the horrors of the Rwandan genocide are tempered by the distance offered by technologies of the military industrial complex; and Ryan, who has progressively lost his sight, retaining just one per cent of vision in one eye. In attending to vision and its primacy in Western society, Sanguedolce materializes the traumas it inflicts, whether through the imperceptibility of truth and its subjective red herrings, obfuscations and blind-spots, or the moment where recognition changes you forever—often for the worse. Blinding couples the confessional intimacy of a documentary with a hypnotic panoply of hand dyed images, luring its audience into a compromise between visual skepticism and optical sumptuousness."
Director
"From innovative filmmaker Steve Sanguedolce, comes the independent masterpiece DEAD TIME. DEAD TIME is the story of two sisters, Wendy and Julie, who grapple with drugs, crime, prostitution, family, and ultimately hope for their future. Always one careless step away from death, the sisters attempt survival in spite of major pitfalls in their lives. DEAD TIME follows Wendy’s turmoil through one failed marriage to Mark, followed by a relationship with convicted criminal Reg— a drug dealer into selling large quantities of cocaine, hash, and heroin. Julie on the other hand finds herself delving into all things taboo—prostitution, the porn industry, and excessive use of LSD. Like a house of cards ready to topple, their lives play out through a series of revelations and efforts to regain control over their inner worlds." - Jason Beaudry, CINEFEST 2005
Director
Part documentary, part fiction, the story of three brothers (Antonio, Sybil and Zed) aged five to seven as they try to find their way in the world. Combining elements of Super-8 diary work, documentary and drama, the stories are told by actual subjects talking about their own lives and range in scope from religious transformations to heroin overdoses.
Director
"One of the best films of this year's short film program, Sanguedolce's 59 minute movie is an audacious story that takes a unique journey into its own heart of darkness. With a nod to Francis Ford Coppola, Joseph Conrad and The Price is Right host Bob Barker, it's a story that has its own epic quality taking us from a small Sicilian village to the jungles of Thailand."
Director
"Perhaps the most evocative short film in the Toronto Festival of Festivals program is Steve Sanguedolce's Sweetblood which examines the strained relationship between the filmmaker and his emotionally detached father. A collage of family photographs and cryptic subtitles fills the screen while the voices of his family and his personal thoughts are heard. An emotionally stirring film in which the pain of unresolved family issues washes over the viewer." (Ingrid Randoja, NOW Magazine)
Director
"In Mexico, experimental filmmakers Hoolboom and Steve Sanguedolce set out to dissect the travel bug. Hoolboom's deadpan, incisive voice-over offers the viewer the air-tight experience of a Third World holiday, while images from an archaeological museum to a bullfight to an auto factory establish the dual contexts of tourism and Free Trade." (Toronto International Festival Catalogue)
Director
"In Rhythms of the Heart, Steve Sanguedolce's affinity for expressionistic documentaries turns to the depiction of a ruined relationship. Rhythms of the Heart typifies many of the Escarpment School concerns in its blend of personal narrative and landscape, redrafting its romantic heritage in a love story that deconstructs narrative traditions even as it tears its characters apart. Sanguedolce insistently replays loss through a metaphorical landscape while tirelessly focusing on the personally domestic. The films' centre presents a myriad of visual enclosures such as sparsely lit studios, counter tops or framed bathrooms. The characters search throughout the film to find space within the maze of these settings which could allow them to live without the (Dionysian) dissolutions of sexual passion or the (Apollonian) dictates of the law." - Mike Hoolboom
Director
Woodbridge is a deeply personal expose of family life within the context of first generation Italian-Canadians. The film revolves around the journey of a boy from early childhood through adulthood. It highlights the conflicts of growing up in the space between two cultures with radically different customs and values. While this film documents the particular experiences of one child, it is a reflection of a sociological phenomenon common to many Canadian children. Woodbridge is different from most other documentary work primarily because the camera adopts the role of the protagonist. It presents the viewer with a multitude of images/experiences from a purely subjective point of view. The film's immediacy invites the audience to participate in the events directly, as opposed to the usual documentary experience of filmmaker as authority, audience as observer.
