The CFC Worldwide Short Film Festival announced its program lineup this week.
The annual press conference (Sassafraz again this year) again provided a fun hop-nob in the middle of the day.
The festival runs June 16-21, click HERE for the Program listings.
Here’s the clever ad campaign, featuring ‘Critic Cal’, the critic with a short attention span:
Adoration (2009) dir. Atom Egoyan
Starring: Devon Bostick, Scott Speedman, Arsinee Khanjian
**
I am a big Atom Egoyan fan, which extends even beyond flag waving patriotism. Even his recent lesser-regarded films, “Where the Truth Lies”, “Felicia’s Journey” dug into me and struck a chord. With “Adoration” it’s Egoyan again, his trademark multi-layered elliptical style with a peculiar story about a teenager’s conflicts reconciling the death of his parents. If this were another filmmaker’s film, I’d might call it a triumph of tonal control and metaphorical storytelling, but with Egoyan, it’s something we’ve seen before, but with more preciousness and with lesser emotional punch. Read the rest of this entry »
1 Comment | 
2009, Atom Egoyan, Drama, English | 
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Posted by Alan Bacchus
Professor Norman Cornett (2009) dir. Alanis Obomsawin
Documentary
***
We all remember our best teachers, the ones who make education more than just about learning, the ones who inspire us to understand and embody the information we usually cram and memorize in the final days before the final exam. This was the influence McGill University professor Norman Cornett had on his students and the subject of the latest film from acclaimed director Alanis Obomsawin. It’s a welcomed change of pace for Obomsawin whose subjects (ie. Kanehsatake) usually involve Aboriginal concerns. Here Obomsawin branches out with this small scale but inspirational doc about the best professor his students ever had, and probably the best professor you never had. Read the rest of this entry »
1 Comment | 2009, Alanis Obomsawin, Documentary, English, Hot Docs 2009 | Permalink
Posted by Alan Bacchus
Paris 1919 (2009) dir. Paul Cowan
Documentary
**
War is a terrible thing, and the First World War was one of the worst, not the easy-to-define good guys/bad guys war, but the result of a complicated escalation of events, skirmishs and alliances built up over decades. None of that mattered when the victorious nations gathered in Versailles for the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 to decide the fate of the ‘loser’, Germany. Vengeful nations who lost hundreds of thousands of its soldiers and civilians came after the Germans looking for monetary and territorial compensation. This National Film Board documentary tells the story of these crucial six months of negotiations between the world’s powers, which by lack of foresight and stubbornness resulted in an even more destructive war 20 years later. Read the rest of this entry »
Leave a Comment » | 2009, Co-Production, Documentary, English, French, Hot Docs 2009, Paul Cowan | Permalink
Posted by Alan Bacchus
Invisible City (2009) dir. Hubert Davis
Documentary
**
“Invisible City” premieres in Hot Docs with a certain degree of anticipation, certainly for the Canadian filmmaking community. Director Hubert Davis’ first doc “Hardwood” was fantastic and earned him an Oscar nomination for Best Documentary Short Subject. His first dramatic short, “Aruba” was equally fantastic. And so arrives “Invisible City”, a National Film Board feature doc, continuing Davis’ themes of family and despair in the inner city of urban Toronto. The intentions are worthy, shedding much needed light on the ‘invisible’ community of Toronto’s Regent Park and its families with so much working against success resulting in a self-perpetuating cycle of despair. Unfortunately, a consistent frustration persists from the inability of the documentary to expose the true emotions of its characters. Read the rest of this entry »
Leave a Comment » | 2009, Documentary, English, Hot Docs 2009, Hubert Davis | Permalink
Posted by Alan Bacchus
Fernando Meirelles’s “Blindness” was one of the most divisive of Canadian films in recent memory. Since the Cannes Premiere there were heated debates about the film.
Cinematical’s James Rocchi summed up the film, as “a clear case of a film, and filmmaker, failing to hit the mark occasionally only because they’ve set the bar so high for themselves” and “a curious mix of highbrow literary aspirations and lowbrow genre fiction”. Montreal Mirror’s Matthew Hays called Don McKellar’s screenplay “a wondrous apocalyptic adaptation.” Manohla Dargis of the New York Times, is more curt, referring to it as a “bad movie”. Variety’s Justin Chang finds it “an intermittently harrowing but diluted take on José Saramago’s shattering novel. Read the rest of this entry »
Leave a Comment » | First Weekend Club | Permalink
Posted by Alan Bacchus
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