Canada

A botched diamond burglary and a dead publishing company executive set off a string of murders and betrayal in this suspensful, nonstop thriller!Read More »

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The most intriguingly circumscribed romance of the year, In Between Days locates two Korean teens at a precarious point in their relationship. Director So Yong Kim deliberately shuns cultural specificity, keeping her camera tight around Aimie (Jiseon Kim), a recent immigrant from Korea, in order to stress the sense of suffocating remove that might affect a lonely young person living within the walls of a foreign city’s Koreatown. The director’s experiment in non-description can be frustrating (where are we? United States? Canada?), but it is also very poetic and humane (totally Dardennian), getting as it does to the core of the pain that comes with cultural assimilation. In Between Days is also an oddly gripping show of sexual one-upmanship, and something of a fuck-you to reprocessed cheese like When Harry Met Sally that passes for an authentic depiction of the way genders relate to one another. Read More »

Zero Patience is a 1993 Canadian musical film written and directed by John Greyson. The film examines and refutes the urban legend of the alleged introduction of HIV to North America by a single individual, Gaëtan Dugas. Dugas, better known as Patient Zero, was tagged in the popular imagination with the blame in large measure because of Randy Shilts’s history of the early days of the AIDS epidemic, And the Band Played On. The film tells its story against the backdrop of a romance between a time-displaced Sir Richard Francis Burton and the ghost of “Zero” (the character is not identified by Dugas’ name).Read More »

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«La Région Centrale» was made during five days of shooting on a deserted mountain top in North Quebec. During the shooting, the vertical and horizontal alignment as well as the tracking speed were all determined by the camera’s settings. Anchored to a tripod, the camera turned a complete 360 degrees, craned itself skyward, and circled in all directions. Because of the unconventional camera movement, the result was more than merely a film that documented the film location’s landscape. Surpassing that, this became a film expressing as its themes the cosmic relationships of space and time. Cataloged here were the raw images of a mountain existence, plunged (at that time) in its distance from civilization, embedded in cosmic cycles of light and darkness, warmth and cold.Read More »

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This docudrama, filmed in the frozen northern reaches of Canada and Russia, depicts some of the technical difficulties that filmmaker Robert Flaherty encountered when he staged scenes for his 1922 silent film Nanook of the north. It shows how he initially clashes with the Inuit culture, but eventually a friendship develops with the protagonist, Nanook, and the rest of the community.Read More »

Scatterbrained Polly gets a job as a secretary in Gabrielle’s art gallery. Polly aspires to be a professional photographer, and idolizes Gabrielle for her artistic ability. When Gabrielle rekindles an old romantic relationship with the younger painter Mary, Polly becomes jealous, and discovers Gabrielle is not who she claims to be.Read More »

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Teenager Peter Mark has it all: supportive parents, a loving girlfriend, and a comfortable middle-class existence. But on the brink of finishing high school, he feels emboldened by his impending freedom, and decides to pursue a rebellious new path. After his parents make their disapproval known, Peter decides to move out on his own, confident he’ll conquer the working world with his insight and sophistication. When the reality turns out to be far less glamorous, he settles for a shady new job – that continues his criminal evolution.Read More »

Noah Piugattuk’s nomadic Inuit band live and hunt by dog team, just as his ancestors did. When the white man known as Boss arrives in camp, what appears as a chance meeting soon opens up the prospect of momentous change.Read More »

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“This neat, finely tuned, hypersensitive film examines the outside and inside of a banal prefab classroom, stares at an asymmetrical space so undistinguished that it’s hard to believe the whole movie is confined to it, and has this neck-jerking camera gimmick that hits a wooden stop arm at each end of its swing. Basically it’s a perpetual motion film that ingeniously builds a sculptural effect by insisting on time-motion to the point where the camera’s swinging arcs and white wall field assume the hardness, the dimensions of a concrete beam. “In such a hard, drilling work, the wooden clap sounds are a terrific invention, and, as much as any single element, create the sculpture. Seeming to thrust the image outward off the screen, these clap effects are timed like a metronome, sometimes occurring with torrential frequency.” – Manny Farber, Artforum, 1970Read More »