About

"Being painfully aware of my intrusion and my obsession to confront what is not mine - what I do not own, I compile my desires in films that are both violent and beautiful in their depiction of external events. My films deal with the colouring that takes place when the camera is held to the eye, as well as what it means to record an event, carry it over and return to it later in an attempt to reshape it. To point a camera is to point back at oneself, thereby revealing one's own reality or shaping of experience. Recorded sounds and images are merely impostors of an internally informed reality. In the final analysis, filmmaking has more to do with who is behind the camera than in front of it. When I first begin a film, mm primary concern is with developing a process-oriented approach rather than working through any preconceived plan. Since my films are explorative in nature, the actual process of making the work is as important as the finished piece. This working method enables me not to take for granted the camera, choice of film stock, editing or sound, but rather, to work with them in an attempt to express and define my personal sensibilities toward the subject)s). This allows me the opportunity to interchange aesthetic principles that are common to image, sound and editing. A good example of this marriage is my work with rhythm that is expressed through my camera work, music and editing. In fact, my commitment to rhythm and music has given my work a pronounced musical quality in an attempt to create a new language - one that speaks of a personal ordering, devoid of the constricting chains of dominant "narrative" form." ---- Steve Sanguedolce.

“Sanguedolce is a self-taught celluloid magician.” Gemma Files, eye Weekly

“Sanguedolce is one of the best young filmmakers in the country.” Mark Horton, Edmonton Journal

“For years one of the country’s most daring diary filmmakers.” Cameron Bailey, NOW

“One of the most influential independent filmmakers in the Canadian scene.
Marc Glassman, National Film Board

"Sanguedolce creates provocative, smart and ingenious works on film which brilliantly blend the personal and the universal". Alex McKenzie, Blinding Light Cinema

“Sanguedolce’s work continues to forge new links between movies and home.” Mike Hoolboom, Fringe Film in Canada.

“Sanguedolce has dedicated himself to making films about the darkest and most intimate moments of the person’s self.” Angela Baldassarre, Tandem

“When the subject of distinctive Canuck auteurs comes up, the discussion usually exhausts itself after Cronenberg, Egoyan and Bruce MacDonald (and to a lesser extent Patricia Rozema) are talked about to death. And that's kind of sad, because we Canadians have our own gonzo filmmakers who warrant a piece in those discussions. One such person is Torontonian Steve Sanguedolce. “ Adrian Lackey, Vue Weekly

“If processing and developing film was like a Betty Crocker recipe bake-off, Steve Sanguedolce would be the teenage contestant Gidget on crack.” Si Si Penaloza, L.I.F.T. newsletter

Born in Toronto, Sanguedolce’s obsession with home movies led him to an enduring interest in the family. But it wasn’t until his tenure at Sheridan College (1978-81) that he would be lent tools to grant his interest expression. There, schooled in the personal documentary ethos of the “Escarpment School”, Sanguedolce would begin a body of work that would peer relentlessly into the darkest and most private moments of the self. After college he co-directed the scathing poetic documentary Full Moon Darkness (1983), a brave and moving portrayal of ex-psychiatric patients which remains a signpost of poetic outrage and community unrest. His next five movies would establish him as one of North America’s premiere diary filmmakers winning a dozen international awards, returning home to make Woodbridge (1985), a deconstruction of Italian mores, dissembling personal romance in the raw nerved Rhythms of the Heart (1990), puncturing the myth of the traveler in the award winning Mexico (1992), revisiting a history of family photos in Sweetblood (1993), the audacious Away (1996), intimately focused on the story of a man’s search for his long lost twin brother and arguably his strongest film to date SMACK (2000), a challenging hybrid documentary/ drama which follows the story of three brothers into a heroin induced nightmare of addiction.

Steve Sanguedolce belongs to the Escarpment School - a loosely knit group of filmmakers that includes the likes of Mike Cartmell, Marion McMahon, Rick Hancox, Gary Popovich and Philip Hoffman. Born and raised along the craggy slopes of the Canadian shield, their work typically cojoins memory and landscape in a home movie/documentary based production that is at once personal, poetic and reflexive. Inheritors of the 19th century Lake Poet romantics, "nature" is typically figured as a metaphor for consciousness, a visible hieroglyph of mind motion. Woven into their surround are images of a more personal sort- Hoffman's dying grandmother in passing through/torn formations, Popovich's family picnics in Elegy or McMahon's graduation ceremony in Nursing History. The Escarpment School is part of Canada's third generation of avant-garde filmmakers, a generation which has come of age in the late 80's. They have inherited both the increasing institutionalization/academicization of avant-garde film and the feeling of "coming too late" - or working after the canonized achievements of American "great works". As artists well versed in the history of their medium, their response has been two fold. The first is to take an active part in the shaping of their own destiny - many are teachers, administrators, board members of artist run centres/film co-ops and members of screening groups. The second has been the production of synthetic work that collages heterogeneous materials in a weave that strains a home movie manufacture through language. Their work often reflects on absence and death, typically contrasting the camera's movement through landscape in the present with a memory condemned to history. These pastoral sojourns make the simply visible into a sign for all that cannot be brought before the camera's even stare. It is at this point, between presence and absence, now and then, that the filmmaker enters, hoping to re-member the two in what may be regarded as both a celebration of a newly synthetic consciousness and a lament for all that's already passed.