NEW DOCUMENTARY, NEW CINEMA
“They could be images unearthed from another era, perhaps from another planet ... A singularly eccentric movie.” KEITH UHLICH, TIME OUT NEW YORK
VANCOUVER PREMIERE!
TWO YEARS AT SEA
USA 2012. Director: Treva Wurmfeld With: Sam Shepard, Johnny Dark
Great Britain 2011. Director: Ben Rivers With: Jake Williams
Sam Shepard is a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and Oscarnominated actor. Johnny Dark is a recluse and odd-jobber who works at a supermarket deli counter in a small town in New Mexico. The two are best friends, and have been for decades. Treva Wurmfeld’s poignant documentary, world-premiered at last fall’s TIFF, probes the complexities of friendship, family, masculinity, fame, failure, and creative life as it explores a compelling, complicated oddcouple relationship. Shepard and Dark met in Greenwich Village in the early 1960s and became fast friends. They later became bound by (unconventional) family ties: Dark married a woman named Scarlett, Shepard married Scarlett’s daughter, and they all lived together for years in a communal two-family household. When Shepard abandoned the home to be with actress Jessica Lange, Dark was left to raise Shepard’s son! Shepard and Dark finds the old friends coming together in 2010 to work on a project — a publisher wants to release a collection of their voluminous correspondence — and also finds Shepard in a reflective mood, having just split from Lange. Reunited, Shepard and Dark display all the ease, intimacy, and joviality of old compadres, but Wurmfeld’s warm, deceptively low-key film is also candid about old wounds, lingering resentments, and petty irritants, which threaten to send things sideways. Colour, Blu-ray Disc. 92 mins.
“Startlingly intimate ... There’s a lot of hurt lingering in this bromance, but the swings between tender and tragic make for a captivating and richly emotional story.”
FRIDAY, MARCH 8 – 6:30 PM SATURDAY, MARCH 9 – 4:30 PM & 6:30 PM SUNDAY, MARCH 10 – 4:30 PM & 6:30 PM
JOHN DEFORE, HOLLYWOOD REPORTER
STEVE DOLLAR, GREENCINE.COM
“Offers not just an intimate perspective on playwright Sam Shepard’s biography but some touching reflections on the comforts and perils of long-term friendship.”
“Pulls you in instantly with its beautiful opening image ... Interpreting Two Years at Sea is far less important (or necessary) than watching it, experiencing it as it happens.”
The first feature-length film by British experimentalist/hybridist/DIYer Ben Rivers (whose acclaimed shorts were showcased in The Cinematheque’s monthly DIM program in 2010) is a work of enigmatic beauty, exploring solitude, the passage of time, and the expressive possibilities of landscape. Rivers’s art has often found the otherworldly and extraordinary in lives lived on the margins and in the wilderness. The subject here is Jake, a hermit living off the grid in the Scottish Highlands. (Jake was also the MANOHLA DARGIS, subject of Rivers’s 2006 short This is My NEW YORK TIMES Land). Nearly wordless, this observational portrait of person and place documents the rhythms, rituals, and idiosyncrasies of Jake’s solitary life over the course of a year and the passing of four seasons. It was PETER BRADSHAW, THE GUARDIAN shot by Rivers using black-and-white 16mm anamorphic stock, developed and processed by hand, and blown up to 35mm — to gorgeous, grainy, strikingly photographic effect. The film also has fantastical tendencies that tip its “realism” into stranger, more mysterious realms — demonstrating why Rivers has questioned the use of “documentary” to describe his works. “Rivers’s movies combine elements of portraiture, landscape film, ethnography, and travelogue while largely ignoring the rules of each genre ... Two Years at Sea is somewhere between documentary and daydream” (Dennis Lim, New York Times). B&W, 35mm. 88 mins.
“What a strange and intriguing film!”
FRIDAY, APRIL 26 – 8:30 PM SATURDAY, APRIL 27 – 6:30 PM SUNDAY, APRIL 28 – 8:30 PM THURSDAY, MAY 2 – 6:30 PM
“Sure to be one of the most gripping and ferocious cinematic experiences of the year, Leviathan is a documentary like no other.” ANDRÉA PICARD, TORONTO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL PRECEDED BY
A startling immersive, visceral, made-in-a-maelstrom mix of ethnographic, documentary, experimental, and hallucinatory filmmaking — think Deadliest Catch (or Herman Melville) by way of Stan Brakhage — Leviathan is a truly singular cinematic and sensory experience. “Co-creators Lucien Castaing - Taylor and Véréna Paravel — both artist-filmmakers hailing from Harvard’s innovative Sensory Ethnographic Lab — offer us an all-hands-on-deck view of commercial fishing in the North Atlantic that is visually and sonically explosive. Shot off the New Bedford coast in DENNIS LIM, NEW YORK TIMES the very waters where Melville’s Pequod gave chase to Moby Dick, Leviathan captures the collaborative clash of man, nature, and machine. Dozens of cameras, tossed and tethered from fisherman to filmmaker, propel the film forward with gripping immediacy, literally soaking the viewer in the sensory experience ... The chaotic cacophony of life at sea yields a perspective in constant flux, as we shift from the filmmakers’ and fishermen’s sodden points of view to that of their prey, captured with cameras plunged into the deep ... An exciting marriage of aesthetics and ethnography, thrillingly experimental ... Leviathan is an audio-visual tour de force of cosmic proportions” (Andréa Picard, Toronto I.F.F.). “The ne plus ultra of immersive documentaries ... They have discovered new forms of cinema” (Vancouver I.F.F.). Colour, Blu-ray Disc. 87 mins.
“An immersive cinematic experience ... Leviathan, which looks and sounds like no other documentary in memory, is likely to be one of the most talked-about art films of the year.”
USA/France/Great Britain 2012. Directors: Lucien Castaing-Taylor, Véréna Paravel
Magnetic Reconnection Canada 2012. Director: Kyle Armstrong
Alberta filmmaker Armstrong’s experimental documentary short contrasts the natural phenomenon of the Northern Lights with decaying man-made debris in the northern outpost of Churchill, Manitoba. Featuring an original score by Jim O’Rourke (Sonic Youth), narration by Will Oldham (Bonnie “Prince” Billy), and some of the most gorgeous images of the aurora borealis ever captured. Colour, 12 mins. FRIDAY, APRIL 26 – 6:30 PM SATURDAY, APRIL 27 – 8:15 PM SUNDAY, APRIL 28 – 6:30 PM THURSDAY, MAY 2 – 8:15 PM
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