In 1981, the world of film festivals was very different. Sundance wasn’t even known by the title of Robert Redford’s most famous role. It was The Utah/US Film Festival, just moved from Salt Lake to Park City. The Toronto International Film Festival was five years old, also under its former name, The Festival of Festivals, […]
Arts & Culture
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Girl Talk
A young girl—still a virgin—is called a slut simply because she lives in a group home. At the age of 10, another girl overhears her principal whisper “slut” as she walks by in a pair of short shorts. Yet another makes the mistake of kissing a boy and ends up being shunned by her classmates […]
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The passion of Pelagie
When Pelagie, the latest production from Two Planks and a Passion Theatre, opens in Halifax this week, it will be une affaire bilangue. The show, based on 1979’s Pelagie: La Charrette by author Antonine Maillet (consider her an Acadian Margaret Atwood, if not in terms of subject matter then at least in terms of importance […]
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Murderball
The assumptions of fear and pity that keep people from documentaries about the disabled are shattered in the opening minutes of Murderball. Quadriplegic rugby players are introduced against the sledgehammer-to-the-face ferocity of Ministry’s “Thieves.” Rage sidesteps maudlin outsider perspective, readying viewers to accept the subjects as human. At its most basic, Murderball is an Inspirational […]
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Free Form’s function
“Hold on, let me give a quick hurray — we just found out we’re not lost,” says Ryan Wylie, turning away from his cell phone to cheer on his fellow passengers. Navigation woes are inevitable as the co-founder of the Free Form Film Festival travels across North America in a convoy of three vehicles—two vans […]
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Great escape
Douglas Coupland’s Souvenir of Canada books prove our country’s fascination with our own iconography. From stubby beer bottles to Nanaimo bars, Coupland’s photographic dissection of Canadian culture is one of the most amusing visual interpretations of our home and native land. Artist Leah Modigliani grabs hold of Coup-land’s magnifying glass and looks much deeper. Although […]
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Inside the Fringes
Challenging the very definition of the term fringe, this year’s Atlantic Fringe Festival includes three established companies: Angels and Heroes, Foghorn and Exodus Theatres. Alongside Angels and Heroes’s raunchy Hard-On House (a take-off on George Bernard Shaw’s Heartbreak House) and Foghorn’s emotionally raw I Stand Before You Naked by Joyce Carol Oates, Exodus’s production of […]
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The anniversary party
If ever she once was, Lia Rinaldo is no longer bothered by a new film festival in Montreal. “It became quite clear that we were pursuing different things,” says Rinaldo, the Atlantic Film Festival’s director, of the new event that overlaps with AFF’s 25th anniversary. “So, we haven’t kept in regular contact, as one would […]
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The Brothers Grimm
Two thousand five has been a big year for big-name filmmakers. For me, the auteurist successes have come from Wong Kar Wai, Steven Spielberg, and to a more modest degree, Hayao Miyazaki, Jim Jarmusch and Tim Burton. On the other end of the spectrum is the newest work by Fernando Meirelles, John Dahl, Ridley Scott […]
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Trail Blazing
With her incredibly auspicious debut feature, Me and You and Everyone We Know, the acclaimed multimedia performance artist Miranda July makes the leap to feature film with such skill and vision it’s hard not to feel a tremor of excitement. A new voice in American cinema has arrived. In the annual guide outlining the programs […]
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Making monsters
A block or two from the Via Rail station in Halifax’s lower south end, a nondescript shoebox-style apartment building houses one of the plucky Argyle Gallery’s stable of young creative talents—artist Mary Kim. Her shared flat, really an enlarged bedsit, is hived off into four small rooms, intended, it appears, for tightly budgeted living and […]
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Flowers, Plain And Dukes
Broken Flowers Don Johnston is the type of character Bill Murray has played a lot recently—generally indifferent to his surroundings. As Broken Flowers begins, his fed-up girlfriend leaves him. He then receives an unsigned note from an ex, claiming to have mothered his son. Don doesn’t want to get involved. With his mystery-obsessed family-man neighbour […]
