WOODBRIDGE

32 min. 16mm, col. sd. 1985

A deeply personal expose of family life within the context of first generation Italian-Canadians. The film revolves around the journey of a boy from early childhood through adulthood. It highlights the conflicts of growing up in the space between two cultures with radically different customs and values. While this film documents the particular experiences of one child, it is a reflection of a sociological phenomenon common to many Canadian children. Woodbridge is different from most other documentary work primarily because the camera adopts the role of the protagonist. It represents the viewer with a multitude of images/experiences from a purely subjective point of view. The film's immediacy invites the audience to participate in the events directly, as opposed to the usual documentary experience of filmmaker as authority, audience as observer

Woodbridge is a coming-of-age film, turning from the law of the Father to establish a poetics of self-expression which reconciles the rules of an old- world culture with their new-found setting. The dominant Catholic iconography is contrasted with the filmmaker's quest for release, identity and escape. But this quest for individuation is also a return home, a gesture of nostalgia refigured through the camera. It is the apparatus that attempts to straddle these two worlds, between a generation of Italian immigrants and their Canadian-bound progeny. It is striking to witness how often this paradigm is repeated in the Canadian fringe, its members subject to a displacement which is everywhere felt but never seen. As their parents arrive in ³the new world,² they are born and raised in a Canadian setting which overlaps uneasily with past understandings. Haunted by images of a place they have never seen, they internalize the displacement of their immigrant parentage, never quite feeling ³at home² in Canada, but knowing little of the geography which continues to sound through their parents. As a result, the present appears in a double vision, overlaid with a borrowed understanding, its constituents standing in a place between old world and new. This place ³between² functions to destroy the simple transparency of a place and its representations even as they are drawn to make images in a documentary register, these filmmakers¹ expectations are upset by the understanding that something is missing. This distance between an object and its representation has impelled much of the efforts of the Canadian fringe.