Colin is 42 and a gardening journalist. He's starting to suspect his wife, Freya, of harbouring secret yearnings for her ex, the ageing pop star Gordon 'Midge' Midgely, best known for the novelty hit "Be My Bear". But that's not all. Tomorrow morning, the eccentric colonoscopist Dr Woolf will insert a camera and tell him whether he has bowel cancer. Colin has, however, made a solemn vow. If he gets the all clear, he will sing in a rock group at Freya's 40th birthday party. Only one small detail can prevent him stealing the show - he doesn't actually have a band. But with help from Freya's dad, Erwin, a former session musician, he gets his oddball group of friends to help him out. Can Colin overcome all the odds? His band has little talent and the path to rock and roll glory has not gone smoothly. When step-son Jake takes the mike and announces: 'Please welcome on stage...' Will Colin's mouth go dry? Will he be able to go through with it? What if he falls flat on his face? Or what if there's a twist in the tale that no one has seen coming?
Two unlikely prospective lifeguards vie for jobs alongside the buff bodies who patrol a beach in California.
A film maker decides to channel her grief over her deceased golden retriever into making a documentary about people who rescue dogs and cats 'without names' - meaning with no one to care for them. She works with organizations who rescue dogs and cats from being euthanized and sees anew the power of our bonds with these animals and our responsibilities should we opt to care for them.
A mother seeks out her estranged father in the aftermath of her mother's death.
Filming for Pinochet Porn began in 2008, and the project became the late Ellen Cantor's focus for the subsequent five years. Following her death in 2013, her collaborators completed post-production, according to her instructions. The film is shot on Super-8, with overdubbed sound, and takes the form of a soap opera-like narrative, at once tragic and comedic, chronicling the intertwined lives of five children and their subsequent maturation into adulthood. The story reveals itself as a microcosm of the surrounding political discord, cycles of destruction and mounting violence, obliquely revolving around the Pinochet regime in Chile. These structures of annihilation permeate childhood fantasies, which the characters later create in their lives as adults, pointing to the film's central question: is tragedy a choice?
In 2004, Cantor completed Circus Lives from Hell, a series of eighty-two pencil drawings that would later comprise the hand-drawn script for Pinochet Porn. In making the film, Cantor for the first time, formally served in the role of Director, bringing her drawings to life through a collage of live action sequences, animation, found and historical footage, which together comprises the film's five chapters. Fitting to Cantor's exploration of autobiography, Pinochet Porn is not only about Cantor's life and the lives of her friends, but it is also the active embodiment of her life and the lives of her friends-effectively, her life performing her life.
The cast and crew, and by extension the film itself, have become a document of an extended moment in New York and London avant-garde art and culture. It represents various forms of creative production and a group of artists, curators, writers, filmmakers, underground culture makers, musicians and their children. Pinochet Porn is Cantor's most ambitious and complex work, reaching into every aspect of her practice while forging uncharted territories of the experimental narrative film. The precision with which Cantor employs radical choices of actors, editing, stylistic references, sexuality and found footage within an epic linear narrative structure amounts to a composition that defies genre.