In commemoration of #WorldAidsDay, @FramesFilmSeries presents CONFESSIONS, a selection of works by the prolific American filmmaker Curt McDowell (1945-1987), whose provocative and endearingly irreverent short films embrace the outlandish in a salacious celebration of early 1970's queer underground cinema.

Featuring a recurring ensemble of family & friends, these outrageously bawdy and memorable low-brow delights depict an array of outcast degenerates in a series of subversive broken dream melodramas and campy musical routines.

Preceding the films will be a short presentation by Regional HIV/AIDS Connection (RHAC)(@hivaidsconnect) highlighting their educational outreach and community resources.

Join us, Friday Nov. 11, at 7pm for this 40th Anniversary screening of BLACK WAX, a music documentary and performance film featuring American jazz poet, Gil Scott-Heron (1949-2011) and his 10-piece blues/funk/soul fusion group, The Midnight Band.

A lifelong activist and advocate in the African American community, Gil Scott-Heron's songs are equally as relevant today, confronting subjects of injustice and indignation in the Reagan era through lyrical explorations of poverty, drugs, gun violence, migration and political neglect.

Filmed on location in the streets of Washington, D.C. and on stage at the former Wax Museum Nightclub, this remarkable concert film offers a glimpse of the enduring musical icon in his element.

Three transfixing wonders of barrage-collage found footage filmmaking guide us down a hypnotic trip through fictitious(?) alternative histories & over-stimulating maximalist psychedelia, culminating with Craig Baldwin's influentially renowned, batshit brilliant end times gonzo extravaganza.

This one hour programme of works explores themes of discordant domestic spaces and the underlying unease that resides beneath an otherwise wholesome veneer.

Notions of memory & nostalgia anxiously intertwine through painterly impressions imbued in the frayed emulsions of decaying home movie footage paired alongside depictions of familial recollections bordering on psychodrama.

Presented in partnership with Brown & Dickson Bookstore, we commemorate International Workers Day (May 1st) with a 16mm presentation of the landmark 1976 labour rights documentary, Union Maids, a collaborative film project recording the stories and recollections of three women involved in the struggle for worker's rights and the founding of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, a multi-racial labour union in 1930's America.

This significant historical work will be preceded by the rarely seen NFB short, The Working Class on Film (1975), which offers a glimpse of more than forty years of social-minded documentary from both the UK's GPO Film Unit and The National Film Board of Canada.

The program features several recent works (Lineage (for Norman McLaren) (2019, 4 x 16mm), de rerum natura (2019, 3 x 16mm + video), Home Means Never Having to Say You’re Sorry (2021, 4 x 16mm), alongside some of his best-known projector performances (including the seven-projector show-stopping Last Light of a Dying Star (2008/2011)).

He will also include a sampling of recent essayistic videos, presented as live-narrated documentaries. These works take on a range of topics from the forbidden pleasures of men crying (Historia Calamitatum (The Story of My Misfortunes)) to the racial politics of font choices (The Comic Sans Video) and the real spaces of the virtual economy (Amazonia).

A selection of works by historical and contemporary avant garde Canadian filmmakers, this programme offers a glimpse into the vibrant landscape of moving image artistry in Canada.

Inspired by the recent release of the extensive compendium book of the same title, edited by Barbara Sternberg and Jim Shedden, which features essays & profiles by Michael Zryd and Stephen Broomer tracing the various figures, film scenes, co-ops and movements from the 1950's to the present day.