To create a self-portrait is to create an incomplete work, one in which the end is missing. Perhaps the sense of more to come, an awareness of things left out, lends itself to a searching, inquisitive attitude towards what is included. In tonight's three self-portraits by women, the "I" of today is linked to the "I" of their pasts. But the past isn't easily placed at the beginning of the film, nor does the present fit easily at the end; rather, the two seem inseparable, linked through the enduring influences of family and culture. A Song of Air, a film by Merilee Bennett (1987, 26 mins, Color, 16mm, Print from Australian Film Commission): Australian filmmaker Merilee Bennett grew up on film; family outings and antics were captured endlessly by her father with a camera he bought for her mother. He also wrote short scenarios which he directed, starring his whole family. Years later his youngest daughter picked up the movie camera and turned it back on these early family images to reveal that life at home-like life in their movies-was scripted and directed to fit her father's ideal of family life. When her own poetic images encounter her father's home movies, there is a conflict of ways of viewing the world; whether through the viewfinder or not, Bennett sees what her father would not. Coffee Coloured Children, a film by Ngozi Onwurah (1988, 15 mins, Color, 16mm, Print from Women Make Movies): A poignant, powerful autobiographical portrait of two black children of a white mother and absent Nigerian father, the only blacks in an all-white English community. Over re-enacted footage, Onwurah recalls her childhood, the difficulty of forming a sense of identity when all reflections, save those of her brother and the mirror, were white. Neither talcum powder nor furious scrubbings in the bath could change this, and finally the time came when she and her brother could wash away, not their color, but their sense of guilt and shame. Our Marilyn, a film by Brenda Longfellow (1987, 28 mins, B&W, 16mm, Print from DEC Film & Video): To be born in the fifties was to have entered an age which constantly documented itself-in print, through the airwaves, on television, with movies. The narrator of Our Marilyn comes into a world tuned to the coverage of Canadian Marilyn Bell's 22-hour labored swim across Lake Ontario. When, as an adult, she documents her own life, she positions herself between two media Marilyns-"ours" and "theirs." Marilyn Bell swimming for Canada and national pride, Marilyn Monroe entertaining troops in Korea, glamorous but unattainable: the differences suggest the differences between the two neighboring countries. But the similarities-two female bodies shaped by the media into larger-than-life images-speak to the similarities of growing up female in the fifites, with the promise of happily-ever-afters dangled always just out of reach, much like the shore of Lake Ontario toward which "our" Marilyn hallucinatingly struggled. Kathy Geritz