Reviews - Page 180

Giving you our points of view on the latest docs in release and on the circuit.

Ruba Nadda’s Gift

This is a story about love—love between a man and a woman from vastly different worlds, love of family and love of multi-cultural Toronto. A good storyteller has the ability to gently open us up, touch our hearts and enhance the way we look at the world. But for real professionals, like Germany’s First Hand Films distributor Esther van Messel, the secret to a successful film is that it’s commercial and subversive. Sabah, the debut feature by writer-director Ruba Nadda, is likely to accomplish both goals. Though modest in scope, it’s a well-crafted romantic drama, entertaining and accessible, while also subverting

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CanDocs – Spring 2005

BRITISH COLUMBIA — Katherine Dodds Paris Stories Paris Stories, The Fiction of Mavis Gallant tells the story of Canada’s famously “unknown” writer. One of The New Yorker’s most frequently published short story writers, Gallant often appears in anthologies of great American writers. A Montrealer who has been living in Paris since 1950 yet writes in English, Gallant has devoted 60 years of her life to the craft of the short story. Both proper and radical, Mavis Gallant is an iconoclast. It was Gallant’s absolute dedication to her work that drew producer/director Lynn Booth to explore her life. Says Booth, “Mavis arranged her entire

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And The Trains Roll On…

For the past several years, Winnipeg has been home to writer and filmmaker Clive Holden, the proprietor of Cyclops Press, and an intense observer of the urban emotional landscape. Holden’s ambitious film cycle Trains of Winnipeg—14 Film Poems premiered at Toronto’s Images Festival this past spring, and has since played Victoria’s Antimatter Festival, Winnipeg’s own Send and Receive, the venerable Flaherty Seminar, and several prestigious venues in Spain. It’s an auspicious début for a hybrid work that could have had a hard time finding venues. Holden calls Trains a “multimedia art project” that exists independently as a book of poems and

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CanDocs – Fall 2004

BRITISH COLUMBIA – Katherine Dodds Secrets “It was going to be a look at how sex education has changed over the last 50 years,” says producer Trish Williams about Secrets, the one-hour doc for CBC on which she is currently in production. “We were looking for revolutionary changes, but we didn’t find them.” Instead what she found was a lack of well-delivered knowledge to young people about their sexuality. “Talking to teenagers became more interesting,” says Williams. Secrets focuses on four teens in the process of becoming sexually active. It’s a hyper-sexualized media environment. “What influences them to be safe and

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