Guy Laliberté left the earth’s atmosphere at 3:00 a.m. in the morning. We’ve said it here before, Woolf + Lapin’s Gilles Brien has written the scientific text that Guy Laliberté will be reciting in space for his Poetic Social Mission whose crux is to heighten awareness about water.
Bit of name dropping those who’ll be participating in the social misson: Salma Hayek, Bono, Julie Payette, Yann Martel, Al Gore, David Suzuki…
Woolf + Lapin’s Yannik Larivée just finished design work on a mixed programme that will open the American Ballet Theater’s fall season. He designed the costumes for Canadian choreographer Aszure Barton’s new show. On October 7th, her company will premiere the new ballet at the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. The work is inspired by a Violin Sonata composed by Maurice Ravel.
Mon pays c’est l’apocalypse ! Trop hot ce film sur la survie post-apocalyptique.
C’est un aperçu de Tête blanche/White, le tout nouveau court de Patrick Boivin, de chez Woolf + Lapin, qui aura sa première mondiale au Festival du nouveau cinéma le 9 octobre prochain. Le programme de la soirée comprend trois films présentés dans le programme Short Cuts Canada du Festival international du film de Toronto. En plus de plusieurs autres courts, dont Danse macabre de Piedro Pires, d’après un concept de Robert Lepage. La soirée marquera aussi les dix ans de Prends ça court !
It’s the video clip for “Ensemble” directed by Jérémie Saindon. Coeur de Pirate is getting a lot of air play in France right now and so is the video. It’s based on the doppelganger principle. It’s nominated for best video clip of the year at L’ADISQ.
Also, Jérémie’s We Are Wolves clip “Coconut Night” is in competition at Namur. It’s probably Jérémie at his experimental best with some pyro work and wicked after effects! It’s also in an art show at 107 Shaw in Toronto where the gallery is presenting works from other filmmakers. “The point is to present music videos as an artistic product and a unique medium of filmmaking.”
Christian Lalumière gagne un prix Gémeaux pour Réalisation : jeunesse – variétés/information pour l’émission Les Pieds dans la marge 3, “L’importance d’innover”. Il gagne ce prix avec les réalisateurs Félix Tanguay, François Lachapelle, Jean-Sébastien Busque, Mathieu Gadbois, Mathieu Pichette et Paul Carrière. Producteur : Groupe Pixcom inc.
Jim Donovan wins best director at the Mexico International Film Festival for 3 Saisons and Carinne Leduc best actress at the Salento International Film Festival in Italy.
C’est un peu le “Dormeur du val” de Rimbaud. C’est surtout très beau. Patrick Boivin tourne des scènes sous l’eau… ça coupe le souffle. Et la fin est toute simple et superbe.
As the Toronto International Film Festival draws to a close, we are featuring our last blog on TIFF films. We may even have kept the best for last, but we are by no means overlooking Campion’s Bright Star or Audiard’s Prophet, but Thai director Pen-ek Ratanaruang’s Nymph is a huge visual treat.
In the tradition of I Am Cuba and Touch of Evil, Ratanaruang opens with an eerie scene shot that is as sensual as it is suspenseful. It is one long shot of nature, catching two men in the process of raping a woman. Then begins a long, long series of camera movements with the lens running across tree bark, leaves, forest plants and water. As though Rataranuang were asking nature to make love to the camera. Imagine a really tense FPS hunt inside your favorite porn scene. It is all accompanied by an uncannily sinister soundscape, finally closing (two cranes and a steadycam later) on the two dead men floating in knee-high, murky water.
That is the opening of Nymph. And like Ploy before it, Nymph deals with the intrusion of a third element into the relationship of a blaséd couple. This time, the element is a tree.
“The idea for this film came from the image of a guy doing it with a tree. Then it grew from there,” Ratanaruang says. In old Thai legends tree spirits are personified by vengeful and lustful females. Thus the title.
This is where the cautionary tale begins.
Nop, a photographer, brings May along on a photo assignment in the forest. She’s detached, laconic and can’t seem to pry herself away from her cell phone. We know she has a lover back at the office. Ratanaruang cast lead actress Wanida Termthanaporn, an unknown, because “she has a guilty expression all the time. And that’s what the script lacked—guilt.”
Nop soon meets the fateful tree. Yes it sounds far-fetched and maybe even a little silly. But Ratanaruang has so adeptly prepared us for this that it works. The film never falls prey to the Hollywood trappings à la Lord of The Rings. So no SFX to embody supernatural forces that are seemingly the cause of Nop’s disappearance. Instead, Ratanaruang relies on skillful story telling that is all ambiance driven, banging out a few themes on the way: contemporary angst, alienating technology, illicit affairs and the destruction of nature.
The film is almost a horror, but it’s more of a suspenseful human drama than anything else. Do check it out for size…
This is Andrea Arnold (middle) during Q&A at the Toronto International Film Festival where she is presenting Fish Tank. A coming-of-age tale about a 15-year-old girl living in the slums of Essex, England. It stars Michael Fassbender and newcomer Katie Jarvis who Arnold cast after she was overheard arguing with her boyfriend on a train platform.
Simply put, Jarvis is the film. The story is told from her unique point of view. It’s more than two hours of Jarvis. And it’s never too much.
She plays Mia, a raw teen who doesn’t want to fit in.
The film opens with Mia headbutting the leader of a group of girls, quickly establishing why she’s a loner and spends her time dancing to the sounds of hip hop blaring from her Ipod earphones in a vacant apartment somewhere in the bleak tower she lives in.
Her mother is a blond party girl who sports short, short denim skirts, drinks beer and enjoys noisy sex. When she brings Connor (Fassbender), her new man, home he is not only irresistible to mommy.
After watching Mia dance in a parking lot after a “make believe we’re a family” outing, Connor encourages Mia to follow her dream of being a hip hop dancer. And from there both their fates are sealed. The chemistry between the two after that is likely to explode… and does.
To better prepare for an upcoming dance audition, Connor introduces Mia to Bobby Womack’s cover of California Dreaming. The song becomes a haunting ode to the dreams of otherness Mia pines for throughout the film.
The film’s atmosphere is as coarse as Mia’s language, but the opportunity for giving love is always present. Especially when Mia tries to free an apparently starving white horse tied to a cement block at some trailer trash settlement beside a highway. The horse scenes have an ethereal quality, almost touching something mythical. But when Mia is brutally attacked for trying to free the horse, she drops her prized Ipod in the process.
Mia’s unharnessed rage takes us to yet more unexpected places. And it all works beautifully.
Andrea Arnold has directed the acclaimed short films Milk (98), Dog (01) and Wasp (03), which won the Academy Award® for best live-action short. Red Road (06), her first feature film, was awarded the Prix du Jury at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival. She has been compared to another British great—Ken Loach. And the comparisons are justified.
Arnold brings rare sensibility to family dysfunction and exhilarated hopelessness.
Cesc Gay’s V.O.S is in competition at TIFF. It’s a Romantic Comedy about four friends, one of which is a screenwriter who is writing the story as it unfolds.
Two of the friends decide to have a baby together despite not being a couple. The four begin spending a lot of time together, and unbeknownst to the other two, they start to fall in love.
Like Fiction before it, Cesc Gay’s new film deals with midlife angst and the weight of paring up with “the one” before it’s too late. While Fiction is kind of slow, sad and contemplative, V.O.S. is the exact opposite—fast-paced and funny.
The characters can be in a hospital maternity ward one minute or under fake rain surrounded by a crew the next. The screenwriter character even dictates the action to his friends in one scene to have a desired outcome in the next scene of the script, which incidentally he’s taking his merry time finishing. Sounds experimental? It is.
But the trickiness of this point of departure gets greatly simplified as we settle into the story. He has fun with the tricks of cinema.The main one being, as Gay puts it, the principle “that movies are all one big lie.” In brooding hands, the device would have been used to subvert at best, but instead he uses the lie in very humorous and sometimes very innovative ways.
Telling the story becomes the device that drives the plot. And how he uses the crew to remind us we are watching the process of building a movie really takes off and gets laughs. Every reminder of the lie gets more playful every time. And the film is at its most original here.
It’s based on a top grossing Spanish play, by Carol Lopez, that starred the same actors as the film. “It’s clear that after playing their parts for 300 nights the material was second nature so we didn’t need to rehearse,” Gay says. And the performances are flawless.
V.O.S. is well-built cinema. The film is 100 % self-conscious. And the story is chalk full of American film and TV references. From Kill Bill to Friends to Woody Allen, whose looming influence the screenwriter character dejectedly shrugs off. It’s 86 minutes of bliss.
Let’s hope it doesn’t stay under the radar. Or at the very least, expect an American remake somewhere down the road.