Bio

Kay Armatage has enjoyed a distinguished career as a filmmaker,  academic  and  programmer.  She has made eight films, including “Artist on Fire: The Work of Joyce Wieland,” which won the  Toronto City Award for Excellence in Canadian Production in Documentary.  Her films have been sold for broadcast and shown at festivals, cinematheques and galleries around the world.

Armatage is professor of  Cinema and Women’s Studies at the University of Toronto and a long-time programmer for the Toronto International Film Festival.  Her writing on cinema has been published in Take One Magazine, Canadian Forum, Fireweed, Spirale,  Atlantis and Canadian Women’s Studies. 

Works

Storytelling

  • 1983
  • Kay Armatage

This award-winning film features performances by master storytellers telling tales which together outline the trajectory of a lifespan, from creation, birth, heroic adulthood, to death and regeneration. The stories are inter-cut to effect an almost Proppian analysis of narrative and to suggest an alternative position for women as producers and heroes of culture.

Storytelling

Striptease

  • 1980
  • Kay Armatage

This is a documentary which treats the subject in terms of work, performance and sexuality. In striptease as in dominant cinema, women are presented as sexual spectacle, silent objects to be looked at. This film presents the dancers as speaking subjects, constructing a job profile from the point of view of the women who do the work.

Striptease

Bed and Sofa

  • 1979
  • Kay Armatage

A remake of Abram Room's 1927 silent Russian feature, “Bed and Sofa.” Heralded as a revolutionary feminist film, Room's version was suppressed for its radical treatment of sexual freedom, women's rights, and abortion. Armatage's version shifts the emphasis to the woman's point of view and stylizes the narrative. A comedy.

Bed and Sofa

Jill Johnston: October 1975

  • 1977
  • Kay Armatage, Lydia Wazana

Jill Johnston is the author of “Marmalade Me,” “Gullible’s Travels,” “Lesbian Nation’,” and “Motherbound.” This cinema verité documentary is a portrait of Johnston at work and a feminist author at a transitional point in the women’s movement and in her own career.

Jill Johnston: October 1975