Youth/Childhood

Nest of Tens

Nest Of Tens is comprised of four alternating stories which reveal mundane yet personal methods of control. These systems are derived from intuitive sources. Children and a retarded adult operate control panels made out of paper, lists, monsters, and their own bodies.

Ilene Segalove

My Puberty

Segalove re-enacts the trials and travails of her desperate, hormonal, pubescent years with actors dancing their way through what looks like a techni-color version of the Cleaver’s backyard. She plays herself, getting questionable advice from girlfriends, begging her mother for a bra and falling in love for the first time, with Moondoggie in Gidget Goes Hawaiian.

Peggy Ahwesh

Martina's Playhouse

“In Martina’s Playhouse everything is up for grabs. The little girl of the title oscillates from narrator to reader to performer and from the role of baby to that of mother. While the roles she adopts may be learned, they are not set, and she moves easily between them. Similarly, in filmmaker Peggy Ahwesh’s playhouse of encounters with friends, objects aren’t merely objects but shift between layers of meaning. Men are conspicuously absent, a ‘lack’ reversing the Lacanian/Freudian constructions of women as Ahwesh plays with other possibilities."

Dani Leventhal

Show & Tell in the Land of Milk and Honey

In this piece Dani Leventhal recounts to camera her experiences of living and working in Israel, the fabled land of milk and honey of childhood lessons. With time spent in a metal factory and a battery farm for chickens, her harrowing tale includes stories of sexual harassment and sick birds. Against this background, there are idyllic images of bees and flowers, cows and calves, intimate caresses, dead birds. Every thing is worthy of Dani's gaze, and is transformed by the encounter, becoming more human or sacred, and we are closer to the pain and beauty of being alive.

Jennet Thomas

SHARONY!

This is the story of two young girls who dig up a tiny woman from the back garden. They incubate her in their mouths, in their bed, they lock her in a dolls house wallpapered with pornography to make her grow up faster, feeding her through a tube in the door. When she is life-sized and ready to play they take her to the disco. A dark, comic, experimental fantasy on the implications of Little Girls Toys - with the existential melancholy of Frankenstein's monster. "A compelling exploration of a child's inner life and logic.

Richard Fung

School Fag

A fast-talking and fabulous teen recounts his experiences as an out and loud Toronto queer. With catty wit, he recalls his confrontations with straight students at school and his gay prom at a Toronto gay youth community center, told with a flair for drama and punctuated with enactments of his Wonder Woman fantasies. Fung keeps the format simple, giving voice to his subject.

Peggy Ahwesh

The Scary Movie

Two girls personalize the horror genre with a plot and shot-by-shot structure of their own design, reveling in their ability to reproduce the tropes of horror while, at the same time, taking control of its meaning. With Martina Torr and Sonja Mereu.

This title is only available on Pistolary! Films and Videos by Peggy Ahwesh.

Leslie Thornton

Peggy and Fred in Hell: The Prologue

Peggy And Fred In Hell is one of the strangest cinematic artifacts of the last 20 years, revealing the abuses of history and innocence in the face of catastrophe, as it chronicles two small children journeying through a post-apocalyptic landscape to create their own world. Breaking genre restrictions, Thornton uses improvisation, planted quotes, archival footage and formless timeframes to confront the viewer's preconceptions of cause and effect.

Leslie Thornton

Peggy and Fred in Kansas

Peggy and Fred, sole inhabitants of post-apocalyptic Earth, weather a prairie twister and scavenge for sense and sustenance amid the ruined devices of a ghosted culture. The improvised and playful dialogue of the children provides a key to understanding the tape; their distracted sense of make-believe floats between realities, between acting their parts and doing what they want—patching together identities that, like fidgeting children, refuse to stand still.

Branda Miller

U & I dOt cOm

U & I dOt cOm is an experimental narrative/documentary hybrid about Zoey, a teenage girl who negotiates her identity in cyberspace. Dreaming about the perfect true love, she secretly navigates 3-D worlds to find romance. A web contest sweeps her into a dreamscape of desire and deception as hidden mechanisms of e-commerce, online data-mining, and real-time consumer profiling monitor her every move. When Zoey finally rebels, her sense of self, her home, and her relationship with her mother are forever transformed in the new cyber-cultural domain.

Emily Breer

The Tutor

Joe Gibbons plays Dr. Joe Baldwin, the self-styled child education expert. He prepares Zoe, from birth, for acceptance into a coveted “gifted-only” kindergarten program. He brings to each lesson an assortment of modified educational books, games and toys. These sessions, along with monologues analyzing her development, are recorded in hopes of proving that “genii [his term] are not born, but made.” What becomes evident is one man’s misguided quest to manipulate pitted against one child’s exuberant resistance to being controlled.

Director’s statement:

Suzanne Lacy

The Turning Point/Under Construction

Produced and directed by Darlene Haber/MediaVision, executive director, Suzanne Lacy.

From a performance by Suzanne Lacy with Barbara Clausen and thirty young women from Vancouver Canada, 1997-98.

Ben Coonley

Trick or Treat Pony

A rockin’ talkin’ pony and its human companion examine the evolution of Halloween games, from the ancient rite of bobbing for apples to the contemporary spectacle of American football. Confronting liminality on 3rd down and long, the pony BRINGS IT TO THE HOUSE.

This title is also available on Ben Coonley: Trick Pony Trilogy.

Racké & Muskens

The Tower

Back in the days of hippy bliss, Ulrike and her husband used to believe that the world would be revolutionized by their activities, consisting mainly of smoking pot and having sex. Thanks to a large family fortune, none of them has ever had to work for a living. But the ‘three generation millions’ – one generation makes it, the second maintains it and the third generation blows it – are slowly disappearing. So now the burden of maintaining the tower falls on the children, of whom Sirius (the Latin form of Osiris) actually seems to enjoy making money.

Paper Tiger Television

Torn Between Colors

Using Paper Tiger's unique style of direct address and deconstruction, teenagers from the Bronx ask questions and try to understand the persistence of racial violence in the 1990s. Black and Latino students give a sharp and insightful comparative analysis of the newspaper coverage of two events that were especially traumatic for their community: the January 1990 murder of Yusuf Hawkins by a mob of 30 whites in Bensonhurst, and the Central Park "gang rape" of a white woman by a group of black youth.

Youth/Childhood

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