“Why can’t you just leave me alone?” – Oscar-nominated animator Ryan Larkin, shouting at the screen during one of the first public showings of Alter Egos, the documentary about his history, art and character. Documentary biographies have become so formulaic in their celebration of individuals’ achievements and fame that if someone makes a film portrait
Sometimes a picture burns a hole in your head, burrows into your brain and takes up residence. Like the face of the title character from the new digitally animated 3D short, Ryan. And what a ravaged face it is, with weather roughened skin, deep creases at the mouth, one eye reddened, the other missing. And
A winking post-modern concoction that has, over its very short career, inspired reams of passionate critical response, Incident at Loch Ness is ostensibly about a spectacularly troubled production, mounted by the German documentary (and occasionally fiction film) director Warner Herzog. It finds the indomitable auteur—famous throughout his career for his forcible, occasionally unscrupulous mastery of exotic,
ARISE, ARISE, O ye great-grandchildren of Grierson, Brittain, and Perrault. THE DOCUMENTARY, the only original Canadian art form that means anything to the rest of the world, is in peril. We’re on the CanDoc deathwatch. The intravenous machines are being unplugged. Its whole life flashes before its Nanookian eyes. Why? I can only offer a
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
A good story department is a military operation, led by the showrunner(s) who carries the vision of the series.
The best part of the latest monograph put out by the Toronto International Film Festival Group is the last—Pierre Perrault in his own words—where the passionate, sometimes in-your-face documentarian ends up sounding dangerously close to a stuck pig. Thank goodness then for David Clanfield’s painstakingly careful and thorough 152-page examination of Perrault’s prodigious oeuvre. In
“To search for the good and make it matter: that is the real challenge for the artist. Not simply to transform ideas of revelations into matter, but to make those revelations actually matter.” – Estella Conwill Mojozo You might not expect The Take, the brave new documentary by journalists and political activists Avi Lewis and
JUDGE JUDY MEETS FREDERICK WISEMAN in French filmmaker Raymond Depardon’s compelling feature doc, 10e Chambre, Instants D’Audiences (The 10th District Court, Moments of Trials), a hit on the 2004 film festival circuit. Depardon, a world-renowned photographer and eminent director, spent seven tenacious years gaining “carte blanche” access to film inside the Paris courtroom of Madame
Theatrical cruelty, fairytale morality, dime-store surrealism; Freudian sexuality, alchemical symbology, Black Magick; four-colour Grindhouse violence and more aphorisms per minute than any given episode of Kung Fu, back when people still thought David Carradine looked Chinese. In the limited yet delirious filmography of Midnight Madness auteur Alejandro Jodorowsky (his 1971 international debut, existentialist Acid Western