Canada

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There’s a blood vessel that pumps between the selves we drive through the day and the incubus we nourish, a creative self (perhaps cocreated by a love), relatively unconstrained, who we promise ourselves we will birth some day. The most sublime art is what we imagine that young, more unfettered mind imagines. Its why we live, a large part of it, I think. This is the domain Maddin has decided to explore. Its a sort of Joycean commitment, a raw commitment to dreams less shaped than usual by borrowed items and fed by distilled urges in blood. Small surprise that these don’t fully resonate; its supposed to be strange, strange in disturbing ways. I like the fact that this goes on too long. Read More »

Syd March is an employee at a clinic that sells injections of live viruses harvested from sick celebrities to obsessed fans. Biological communion – for a price. Syd also supplies illegal samples of these viruses to piracy groups, smuggling them from the clinic in his own body. When he becomes infected with the disease that kills super sensation Hannah Geist, Syd becomes a target for collectors and rabid fans. He must unravel the mystery surrounding her death before he suffers the same fate.Read More »

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Paul is a cartoonist who lives with his girlfriend and their little daughter in Montreal in the summer of 1999. His in-laws, the Beaulieus, are a large, joyful clan composed of siblings, grandchildren and a much loved patriarch named Roland who constantly reminds Paul that he has yet to marry his daughter. When Roland fades with ill health, the family bands together and Paul projects his own devotion by doodling several portraits of his ailing father-in-law.Read More »

Two blue-collar Easter Bunnies get fired and try their hand at an assortment of odd jobs, failing at each. Fighting depression, debt and eventually each other, their lives start to unravel until they realize that without their job they are nothing.Read More »

Richard was coming back into town and we set up a gig for him at the local co-op. He was bringing along his new, tough, beautiful, hard-won movie called The Last Days of Contrition. It showed just about everywhere that tough movies were being shown. But for this night we brought dad’s pull-down screen and a couple of boxes of beer and the crowd spilled out into the hallway. We sat around the projector and marveled at how he’d managed to go into America and find it so emptied and cruel. There were how many military vehicles shuttling across the desert in shots he’d waited all day for, so by the time he finally turned the camera on, all that anger had become something else. He really had a knack for the silver light.Read More »

On the Oaxacan coast of Mexico, rumblings of previous times are never far from the surface. Tales of shapeshifting, telepathy and dealings with the Devil are embedded in the colonization and enslavement of the Americas. Characters from the Faust legend mingle with the inhabitants, while attempting to colonize and control nature through a seemingly never-ending building project. Through literature, myth and local entanglements, the frontier between reality and fiction, and the seen and unseen, no longer apply.Read More »

A mother who has recently been incarcerated refuses to give up on her young son, no matter how fragile their connection may now be.Read More »

Bye, See You Monday is a French Canadian relationship drama based on a novel by Roger Fournier. Miou-Miou and Carole Laure star as a pair of attractive young housemates. Both ladies are involved with married men. Both approach these delicate relationships in different fashion and both learn a little something about what happens when one plays with fire. Au Revoir a Lundi, was filmed in 1979, but withheld from general release until the 1981 Moscow Film Festival.Read More »

A surrealistic film in which a strangely assorted group of people come together in the Russian Arctic at the height of the revolution and World War One.

“At once perplexing and joyous, Maddin has crafted a film that, for all the confusion inherent in the tale, unfolds on its own unique terms.” [Austin Chronicle]Read More »