2000s

[B]The Magician’s House[B] 2007, 5:45 Both a letter to a cancer stricken, alchemist-filmmaker friend, and a quiet tribute to the vanishing art of celluloid, “The Magician’s House” is full of ghosts. Including that of Athanasius Kircher, inventor of the Magic Lantern or “Sorcerer’s Lamp”. The music, La lutte des Mages (The Struggle of the Magicians), was composed by Armenian mystic Georges Gurdjieff and Thomas De Hartmann. Gurdjieff thought of man as a kind of “transmitting station of forces.” To him, most people move around in a state of waking sleep, so he sought to provide aural conditions that would induce awareness.Read More »

Synopsis
This is the short Pedro Costa made for the Jeonju Digital Project in 2007. Pedro Costa brings Ventura who is the main character of his previous film, Colossal Youth to this film again and telling about being divested and being alienated of the people who don’t have anything. Alfredo is dumped by his wife after losing his job. Ventura is just comforting him with words. Jose is ordered to quit the country. These three men just have a mean reality seeing the high buildings outside and thinking about their happy days.Read More »

Quote:
While it has been reported on several anime news sites that the newest Takashi Miike film is based on the Hashida Yukari “boy’s love” manga, WARU, the live action film is actually based on a popular 70s manga of the same title. Japanese sources clearly credit Hisao Maki’s dramatic action manga, WARU — an edgy action-packed tale of outlaw swordsman Youji Himuro — as the story on which the film is based.Read More »

Synopsis
Negative Space, is an experiment that’s accessible to anyone who cares about movies, using split screen to question how we look at and remember films, and to look at how film changes with time.

A portrait of film critic Manny Farber, featuring interviews with Farber and art critic Dave Hickey, as well as inventively displayed clips of the films that Farber discusses.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 »

Synopsis
SONG AND SOLITUDE was conceived and photographed with the loving help and kindness of Susan Vigil during the last year of her life. Its glance is more toward an expression of inner landscape, or what it feels like to be, rather than an exploration of the external visual world as such.Read More »

Quote:
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 »

Quote:
Some filmmakers have difficulty traveling between the short format and feature films, the former more often than not feeling like exercises, excerpts, or condensations, or the latter, in rarer cases (given the relative death of the short format some 60-odd years ago) seeming simply like brief ideas outstaying their welcome. The aesthetic of writer/director Eugène Green is so clean and simple in this age of image saturation and hyper-abundant kinetics that his “mini-film” Les Signes feels as natural and fluid as his fascinating longer features like 2004’s Le Pont des Arts and 2003’s miniature knight’s tale, Le Monde Vivant. Read More »

A rookie policeman from provincial Le Havre volunteers for the high pressure Parisian homicide bureau and is assigned to a middle-aged woman detective.Read More »