Canada

Synopsis
The Okanagan Valley is marketed as a destination of leisure, recreation and wealth. Behind this facade is a largely invisible labour force, comprised of temporary migrant workers from the Global South.Read More »

Quote:
Sandra Larson has always been fascinated by the entire sensory experience surrounding death: its touch, smell and look. As a child, she would search out dead animals and perform ritualistic burials. As a young woman, Sandra gets a job at Wallis Funeral Home, first as a general assistant, then progressing to study to become an embalmer. At the funeral home, she begins to take her fascination with death to the next level by becoming a necrophiliac. But she also begins her first ever relationship with Matt, a medical student, with who she is totally open about her necrophilia. He finds this aspect of her compelling. He becomes all consumed with her as she is consumed with dead people. The questions become how far he will take this fascination with her to understand fully what is going through her emotional being, how far she will allow him to go, and how far can her feelings for him extend as a live being.Read More »

“I had a hard name in that place” says Michael, one of the eight ex-cons in Alan Zweig’s new film. His turn of phrase refers to more than just a bad reputation. He’s talking about a hardness of spirit. It may have served him well as a criminal or a prisoner. In the outside world however, that hardness can get in the way. But slipping off the bonds of that hardness is easier said than done.Read More »

Quote:
Set in the strange and oppressive emotional landscape of the year 1983, Beyond The Black Rainbow is a Reagan-era fever dream inspired by hazy childhood memories of midnight movies and Saturday morning cartoons. From the producer of Machotaildrop, Rainbow is the outlandish feature film debut of writer and director Panos Cosmatos. Featuring a hypnotic analog synthesizer score by Jeremy Schmidt of Sinoia Caves and Black Mountain, Rainbow is a film experience for the senses.Read More »

A woman with a troubled past is saved from drowning in a river and brought to a strange community hidden in the woods.

Found drifting down the Saguenay River, half-drowned and clinging to a log, a woman is rescued by Boulder, who carries her to Undersky, his commune in the Quebec wilderness. Named after the river from which she was saved, Saguenay is haunted by memories of her past and remains unresponsive for days, drifting in and out of consciousness. She gradually becomes aware of the life going on around her and begins to explore it. But she senses she has brought ill fortune to this community and fears something in her past has doomed her and all who know her.Read More »

Michele, a divorced aerobics instructor with a gambling addiction, loses her job and seeks refuge with a childhood friend, Janine, who lives in a seemingly comfortable middle-class suburban neighborhood. Michele’s rebellious teenage daughter, Marguerite, and Janine’s shy and reserved daughter, Gabrielle, become friends, leading to unforeseen tensions that force both generations to reassess their values. Familia explores the question of how value systems are passed on from mother to daughter and asks: Is it possible to avoid passing on to our children those traits that we despise in our parents?Read More »

After being fired from her job, Ren, an aspiring writer and mid-twenty-something, accompanies her Canadian-Italian family on vacation. The realities of being a stunted millennial and a trans woman coalesce as Ren struggles to balance the yearning for independence with the comfort of being taken care of.Read More »

More than 20 contemporary North American poets recite, sing, and perform their work. Early in the film, Charles Bukowski talks about the energy of poets and of a poem. These poets are the children of Walt Whitman and of Charles Olson, incantatory and oratorical, radical, sometimes incorporating contemporary political imagery. Black Mountain poets, the Beats, minimalists like John Cage, the wordless Four Horsemen, Tom Waits, and others capture aspects of poets as troubadours.Read More »

Antonin is a bit of a dandy. He has a way with words that could have made him a famous writer, but instead mostly serves to get him out of trouble.Read More »