A trans musician is caught in a love triangle with his bandmates as they rise to fame, in this love letter to Toronto’s 2000s music scene.
In 2020 Karen Knox got a nose job and saw an opportunity for comedy…...dark comedy. Co directors Karen Knox and Matt Eastman filmed The Year of Staring at Noses over the course of three years chronicling the surgery and Knox's alter ego "Samantha's" quest to find love on a reality television show. A lot of it is real. Some of it isn’t. The film is about the contemporary thought poison that we will only find love through self modification in its most shallow expression. In this instance, plastic surgery and reality television. It’s about the digital age brain rot that has lead us to the equation that looksmaxing + capitalism = happiness. This film was made with four people, a girl, a gun, and a camera.
Rosy is a 25-year-old bank teller who ‘aged out’ of the foster care system at 18 and has since managed to build a solid yet unspectacular life for herself. Desperate to fill that parental void, she seeks out an online service that connects older adults looking for adult surrogate children. In turn, this takes Rosy on a surreal journey to find that familial love she has long been searching for.
Cons & Pros follows the story of two con artist women inspired by 2019's media scam darlings Anna Delvey and Caroline Calloway. In order to pull off our con movie, we had to pull off a con ourselves: a piece of Heist Cinema, made by four people on a near zero dollar budget. To make the film we staged a marriage proposal at a luxury Toronto hotel and had our director/cinematographer pose as an "engagement videographer." Costumes were rented and returned from Saks Fifth Ave, and all props/art were courtesy of rich & generous (and lightly duped) strangers. The film was an exercise in how the process affects the product, whilst also exploring what we feel is our duty as millennial artists living on the outskirts of the oppressive Neoliberal torture factory. Cons & Pros is a big middle finger to the capitalist regime's promise of a luxury life that will never be ours. Making this film meant taking it without asking, and showing no mercy.
Gwenlyn Cumyn is a Canadian actor, writer, and producer.