"I have breathed you in and there are no words to exorcise you from my soul." - Eleanor Crow

"An auto-portrait of maternity, ‘private patch’ shows Toronto filmer Tracy German quietly expectant, keening through winterludes of surprise before the birth of her first child. Episodically structured and materially assured, German's exacting observational sense re-creates her domestic surround from the point of view of her boy-to-be, lurking over woodpiles and rock with eyes wide in wonder, turning the surrounding bush into a softly focused pastel glaze.

“Deftly intercutting interiors and exteriors, ‘private’ opens on a wintry porch, a liminal architectural space which is both inside and out, metaphor here for the maternal body which has become the first home of her child (inside), growing quickly towards their moment of separation (outside). A dazzle of crimson flares ensue, miming the boy's closed-eye womb visions, before the filmmaker's face appears, softly turning in a patina of grain, reaching for a closed door. An eye unused to outside receives impressions of winter, closing with a snow forest divided by a path leading to the unknown.

“The central gesture of interiority occurs in two brilliantly photographed scenes in the bath where German's body appears as an accumulation of parts looming into the lens, giant of flesh, passing in and out of focus. A sense of possession pervades , as if the body we are seeing belonged to someone else, that nudity is not naked, its silent partner holding its double in suspension, adhering to old laws written in blood. Throughout a delicately woven amalgam of tones, snippets of conversation and a host of baby's utterances sound off on the track, darkly atmospheric, the muffled roar of a world heard at one remove, from a sealed chamber of blood and tissue refashion the theatre into a darkened cradle. A trio of horses feed in a misty, surreal stillness, Bateman come to life, one of their number breaking from the pack to nuzzle their witness. A kitchen waits with water on the boil, architectures of premonition, vigil by a window and at last he appears, swaddled in sunlight, eyes not yet ready to glimpse a world grown suddenly large. Trees blossom, a dog looks up from the remains of a fading winter, horses reclaim fields of colour. Springtime." - Mike Hoolboom