Movies: Derek May

A 1964 documentary portrait of Cohen in his pre-musician days as a poet and stand-up comedian....

This fictional feature follows a twenty-something man who is struggling to define his position in the world in early adulthood. He has left their parents' home but still has not made an home of his own. Our protagonist’s alienation is palpable; for h...

A view from a helicopter of the ten Canadian provinces in 1966. The result is a big, beautiful and engrossing bird's-eye portrait of the country. Nothing here is quite the same as seen before, even Niagara Falls. Canadians will be thrilled by this pa...

In this short film, a young man, a girl and a dog attempt to fly with wings more symbolic than practical....

The story of two young women who go to the city to work in a dress factory, and who share a room to ease their expenses and their loneliness. The film shows the currents that brought them together and the facets of their natures that first made them ...

This full-length documentary examines the work of Krzysztof Wodiczko, an artist who has taken his art out of museums to project it onto the sides of buildings. The film explores Wodiczko’s philosophy of art as social contract and shows examples of hi...

A film based on the exhibition organized by the National Gallery that toured Canada in 1975. The paintings are juxtaposed with black-and-white newsreel footage of the more obvious social realities during the years of the Depression. The film shows th...

A film where the director turns his camera on his own domestic existence and essays to show it 'like it is' without the structure usually imposed by filmmaking. What he tries to mirror is the essential aloneness of people, life in suspense, of unmoti...

This is a "nowhere tour" of Montréal, a sort of parody of the world we live in, where all is confusion, aimlessness and noise. A recurring figure in the film is a Highland piper walking his beat on a lonely patch of ground beneath an elevated highway...

Experimental filmmaker and color cameraman here collaborate in a surrealistic retelling of the old myth. But this is a dream fantasy with no real parallel to Pandora, replete with striking symbols where everything is larger than life--the silhouetted...