Penny McCann

Set in Depression-era Eastern Ontario, "The Fires of Joanna" tells the story of a woman struggling to endure a harsh and unforgiving life. Joanna McVeigh is a young epileptic woman, who, burdened by an illness for which she is shunned, illuminates her isolation with the pleasures of her one great gift: her ability to set fires with her mind. A tale of sin, guilt, and redemption.

Don't miss this compelling one-hour documentary about the vital role women played in putting an end to World War II by working for Canadian spymaster William Stephenson -- a.k.a. "the Man Called Intrepid."

An incomplete family story leads the filmmaker on a quest to find her mother in the British archives. The discovery of a photograph unearths a story of upheaval, desolation, and ultimately, transformation.

A hand-processed black and white study of the Ottawa River in winter. Commissioned by the Lightproof Film Collective with sound design by Eric Walker.

The Sisters is the haunting tale of the ties that bind women and sisters together. Etched on a gravestone are the stark facts: three sisters who drowned on the same summer day in 1917. A haunting drama about the events leading to their deaths, The Sisters uses evocative and sensual imagery to create a women's tale that is at once both poignant and celebratory.

An experimental triptych filmed in 16mm and Super 8 over a four year period, Phenomena continues the artist's evolving preoccupation with landscape and celluloid practices. Three scenes are observed: a snowstorm in downtown Ottawa, Canada, a gentle winter thaw on a bog, and the raging Ottawa river during spring run-off.

Drawn from Super 8 films in the artists' personal archives as well as found amateur 8mm footage, "Events in the Tunnel" presents an absurdist abbreviated retelling of Canada's colonial history as defined by that great colonial trope, the cross-country train trip. In the transitional void of a train tunnel, we witness familiar 19th and 20th century paradigms of white middle-class conformity as represented by images of travel, amusement, and domesticity, with Canadian culture embodied by a chimeric portrayal of the early 20th century painter Tom Thomson.

The landscape of Lake Ontario is transformed into an ominous expanse using hand processing techniques.

An ordinary rural landscape is transformed into an enigmatic dreamscape. A farmhouse stands in a copper field of scratched emulsion as solarized flares illuminate the sky. Split toned horses amble dreamlike across the frame into inky underexposed blackness. Copper thistles sway in the wind, looming and strangely monumental. The hand-processed 16mm imagery creates an elliptical inner world of memory and dreams.

Something Dancing About Her is an affectionate portrait of Pegi Nicol MacLeod, a charismatic yet relatively unknown painter. Shedding fresh light on her place in Canadian art history, director Michael Ostroff chronicles the life of this remarkable creative spirit who threw herself into painting, left-wing politics and love affairs with equal enthusiasm.

A meditative look at a mutable and hypnotic horizon. Grainy Super 8 imagery, optically printed 16mm footage and an atmospheric soundtrack evoke the stillness of mind reached when standing before expansive sky and water. Filmed at Gibraltar Point Centre for the Arts (Toronto), Lake Ontario (in my head) was created as part of the Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto (LIFT) Film is Dead... Long Live Film! 25th anniversary commissioning project.

Hand-processed 16mm film imagery, tinted, toned, and transformed, is combined with memory fragments of a rural past, to create a poetic narrative about place and time. Filmed at the Independent Imaging Retreat (aka the Film Farm) in Mount Forest, Ontario, in 2008. Experimental sound design by Edmund Eagan and featuring my father's voice, who passed away in 1992.

Buses don't stop here anymore is a chronicle on Super 8 of the closure, abandonment, and demolition of Ottawa’s Greyhound bus station. Once an important site for coming and going, an emotive epicenter, the camera observes the building’s erasure, dismantled by machines that writhe in the dust of demolition. Optical printing translates the act of observation into a requiem for a building, once so present and vital, now a ghost of the past.

Using anonymous home movie footage of Expo '67 in Montreal, the artist sets out to recreate a memory that perhaps never existed. Celluloid manipulation and sound decay techniques coalesce to transform a mythic landscape into a sublime expanse of disintegrated memory