Veil of Years

In this evocative film about the eternal human search for home, Berta and Solomon arrive in a land that promises respite from their many journeys. But have they found utopia... or just another stop on their long journey?

The true story of John Romulus Brinkley, a small-town Kansas doctor who discovers in 1917 that he can cure impotence by transplanting goat testicles into men. And that’s just the tipping point in this stranger-than-fiction tale. With the balls of a P.T. Barnum, the gonads of goats, and the wishful dreams of flaccid men, Brinkley amassed a fortune, was almost elected Governor of Kansas, invented junk mail and the infomercial, and built the world’s most powerful radio station. By the time all of the twists and turns of Brinkley’s story are revealed, Nuts! certainly earns its title.

THE VISIT is an intimate stop-motion short film about a young girl’s growing-up years and her relationship with her incarcerated father.

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

To the toccata portion of Bach's "Toccata and fugue in D minor," we watch a play of sorts. Blue smoke forms a background; a grid of black lines is the foreground. Behind the lines, a triangle appears, then patterns of multiple triangles. Their movements reflect the music's rhythm. Behind the barrier of the black lines, the triangle moves, jumps, and takes on multiple shapes. In contrast with the blue and the black, the triangles are warm: orange, red, yellow. The black lines bend, swirl into a vortex, then disappear. The triangle pulsates and a set of many of them rises.

Parabola is a celebration of film’s ability to create new ways of seeing the forms around us. Creating juxtapositions between light/shadow, stasis/motion, and form/music, this black-and-white short invites us to see the parabolic curve, or “nature’s poetry,” as both invigorating and beguiling.

Spectacle is proud to present HEAD SPACE, a showcase of animated works exploring dimensions both interior and outlying. Featuring an extremely talented and creative group working in a diverse array of styles, the shorts wander through strange and sometimes sketchy landscapes, including alternate-universe appliance stores, the ramblings of Charles Manson, environmental catastrophes in the Dutch style of painting, and a houseplant’s musings. Some, like Sally Cruikshank’s Make Me Psychic, are established classics; others feature newer animators working in looping GIF format, presented away from the small screen’s momentary pleasures to fully appreciate the art that it is. Occasionally gross, often beautiful, and always interesting, HEAD SPACE is a sampler of the thoughts happening inside and out of each frame.

Follow a day of the life of Big Buck Bunny when he meets three bullying rodents: Frank, Rinky, and Gamera. The rodents amuse themselves by harassing helpless creatures by throwing fruits, nuts and rocks at them. After the deaths of two of Bunny's favorite butterflies, and an offensive attack on Bunny himself, Bunny sets aside his gentle nature and orchestrates a complex plan for revenge.

An animated adaptation of Franz Kafka’s acclaimed novella, “The Metamorphosis,” made from carving images into sand with glass.

A choir of tropical frogs performs infectious pop in delightfully unsettling animation from Costa Rican-Canadian artist Bianca Shonee Arroyo-Kreimes. Riffing on karaoke companion videos and the swipe-n-scroll conventions of handheld media, she infuses candy-coloured digital animation with the spectre of ecological collapse.

A precocious young girl makes a new friend when a tiny boy pilot drops out of the sky on a broken flying machine. Now she must race against time to return him home, before her new friend becomes stranded on Earth forever.

A film about (local) patriotism, tourism and emigration. A girl lives in a gray, isolated country, enclosed by a huge wall. She has never travelled anywhere, but all her life she has dreamt of leaving forever for a perfect world called “Abroad”.

The experimental animated short is a collaborative work between Keiichi Tanaami and Nobuhiro Aihara.

The experimental animated short is a collaborative work between Keiichi Tanaami and Nobuhiro Aihara.

In Madonna, Tanaami employs his signature collage-style animation, combining pop art influences, retro aesthetics, and surrealistic motifs. The film explores themes of desire, fantasy, and memory, often referencing elements of post-war Japanese culture and American pop culture.

A kaleidoscope of painted cartoonish images including an obscene mouse. Born in 1936 in Tokyo, Keiichi Tanaami is one of the leading pop artists of postwar Japan, and has been active as multi-genre artist since the 1960s as a graphic designer, illustrator, video artist and fine artist.

Seven characters, who are not connected with each other, live a restless day in the district in renovation of a busting city. Each one pursues a distinct aim and nobody pays attention to the others. A rag doll passes from the hands of one character to the other's. And their ways criss-cross until they finally meet and unite.

In a sweeping tale that spans 1000 years and multiple generations – from the distant past to the 19th century, the present day and a strange, dystopian future – this landmark collection traces the collective histories of Indigenous peoples across Australia, New Zealand and the South Pacific. Diverse in perspective, content and form, traversing the terrain of grief, love and dispossession, they each bear witness to these cultures’ ongoing struggles against patriarchy, colonialism and racism.

When the village school master discovers the body of a mean-spirited, miserly old woman, with whom he has had a disagreement, he decides to dispose of the body himself without alerting anyone else to it, but when the body is discovered by another villager the same cycle begins again, with the body eventually passing through the hands of half of the village.

In a city where fire, water, land and air residents live together, a fiery young woman and a go-with-the-flow guy will discover something elemental: how much they have in common.