Part of Summer 2003
A co-presentation with Splice This! (June 20 – 22 www.splicethis.com)
The Home Made Movies Project returns with more truly mind blowing (yes, that’s the word)&lrquo;¦home movies! The project ferrets out and screens the forgotten, dusty history of amateur filmmaking. Tonight it hooks up with the Reel Folk Archives, Toronto’s own home movie archive, and Pleasure Dome to present one of the treasures from their vaults – the Cherry Street Collection.
The Cherry Street Collection is twenty-five reels of 8mm film shot by a Toronto family between 1939 –1953. The collection presents us not just with a visual record of a family over the course of fourteen years, but a sense of the culture of middle class life in Canada during the period around World War II. Little hints of the world outside the family (a soldier’s bandaged ear, shots of the carnival sideshow at the C.N.E., the wonderful colour images of New York in 1947) give us a better sense of the world sixty years ago. This selection, culled from 1800 ft of film (roughly two and a half hours), presents highlights of a beautifully shot and evocative history.