Jean Luc Godard’s sweeping dictum about the history of cinema (easily located via Google or anyone you know who’s taken a first-year film course) hits a little speed bump in the form of the sixth annual Female Eye Film Festival, which primarily features girls photographing each other. The program kicks off with a special gala screening of Kari Skogland’s soon-to-be-released The Stone Angel (March 27, 7pm, Cumberland), an effective adaptation of Margaret Laurence’s canonical novel of distaff determination. The film benefits from smart casting: newcomer Christine Horne holds her own as the younger incarnation of protagonist Hagar Shipley, no small feat considering that the character is played in her ornery dotage by Ellen Burstyn.

Skogland’s film isn’t exactly a romp, suffused as it is with deeply Canadian themes of guilt, recrimination and life as a drawn-out pyrrhic victor; at the more irreverent end of the scale sits Alison Reid’s short film Succubus, surely one of the sweeter depictions of involuntary sperm donation attempted. Reid’s comic take on family planning is one of the highlights of the Toronto Filmmaker Series (March 28, 7pm, Canada Square), a collection of local efforts featuring post-screening filmmaker Q&As. The evening continues with The Anatomy of Burlesque (March 28, 9pm, Canada Square), a documentary by the late Lindalee Tracey, who passed away in 2006 after a battle with breast cancer.

The film, which was produced in 2003, is being presented in tribute to its creator, whose hale onscreen persona gives it much of its charm. Tracey, a former stripper who famously appeared in Bonnie Klein’s controversial 1981 NFB anti-porn doc Not a Love Story, does well by the history of smut, plumbing its politically subversive traditions without drifting into bland academics (the frequent Chaucer-by-way-of-the-playground sound effects keep things from getting too stuffy).
Also worth catching is Linda Hattendorf’s 2006 festival-circuit fave The Cats of Mirkitani (March 30, 1pm, Canada Square), which begins as a typical outsider-artist portrait concerning an NYC street painter but gains unexpected heft from the details of its subject’s backstory. As an attempt to juxtapose post 9/11 American xenophobia with its historical antecedents, Hattendorf’s film is a shade too blunt, but as a showcase of deeply personal art informed by unimaginable collective loss, it’s extremely moving.