Puccini Conservato was commissioned by the Lucca Film Festival for the 150th anniversary of the famous Italian composer’s birth. In this delightful video, the Canadian master offers a witty visual and sonic commentary to Puccini’s La Bohème.Read More »
During a police strike in Nova Scotia’s capital city, a gang of hoodlums end up unintentionally causing the owner of a gay bar to be killed. This escalates into a string of murders with a lone survivor trying to not be next.Read More »
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In Long Life, Happiness and Prosperity, twelve-year-old Mindy Ho (Valerie Tian) tries Taoist magic to fix her single mother’s (Sandra Oh) financial situation and seemingly hopeless romantic prospects. Mindy’s misdirected charms appear to cause an aging security guard to lose his job and a local butcher to win the lottery. The guard, the butcher and her mother’s stories all intersect, bound together by Mindy’s attempts at magic intervention. Set in the Chinese Canadian community, Long Life, Happiness and Prosperity is a story of hope and the importance of keeping faith in this sometimes difficult world.Read More »
‘Based on John Geiger’s book “Chapel of Extreme Experience”, Nik Sheehan’s FLicKeR is a fascinating voyage into the life of artist and mystic Brion Gysin and his legendary invention the dream machine, a device that projects stroboscopic light, provoking a “drugless high” and cinematic hallucinations. In this Hot Docs world premiere Sheehan captures the dynamic, supernatural world of Gysin, the queer cultural terrorist who fused science, magic and art to expand human consciousness and transcend material reality.Read More »
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Bernard Émond is a veteran documentary filmmaker whose powerful work tends to address themes of loss, memory and the possibility of capturing fragments of truth. La femme qui boit, his stylish and finely acted debut narrative feature, is distinguished by a spectacular performance from Élise Guilbault in the title role and depicts the pain and confusion of a woman’s ruin after years of alcohol abuse.Read More »
Renowned novelist Georges Guérin is out of inspiration to finish his next novel. One day, at a café, a young woman named Daisy recognizes him and they start a conversation. She says she’s a whore and makes such a story of her own life that she becomes the plot for his next novel, expected of all – especially Guillaume Lanctôt, his publisher. As the writing progresses, the relationship between them becomes more and more tender…Read More »
1er amour (2013)
Antoine, 13, spends the summer vacation with his parents in a rented cottage on an island in the middle of the Saint-Lawrence River. His neighbour, 17-year-old Anna, is an enigmatic and lively young woman. Antoine begins to experience the first stirrings of love-which soon yield a troubling brew of anxiety, desire and obsession. He eventually comes across a terrible secret that will forever change his life.Read More »
Double Happiness (1994). Jade is a twenty-something Chinese-Canadian struggling actress. But she is caught between two worlds — traditional and modern — and this is affecting important aspects of her life, from the men she dates to how she fares at auditions. In terms of men, Jade reluctantly satisfies her parents’ old world standards by letting them choose her dates, and even letting them decide how she’ll look when she goes out. But on the sly, Jade’s modern attitudes are reflected in the motorcycle jackets she wears, and her involvement in an interracial relationship. Meanwhile, on auditions, Jade would prefer to play non-“Asian“ characters, but nonetheless finds herself being typecast at every turn. How will Jade rectify the dichotomies that are affecting her life — without losing her family?Read More »
We don’t see the woman on the train moving through Sichuan, just the trees, rivers, lakes and houses passing by the window, vanishing behind the blur of vegetation, segmented by the tunnels.Read More »