Preludes
Commissioned by the Toronto International Film Festival to mark the event's 25th anniversary in September 2000, the "Preludes" program consisted of ten short films by Canadian directors which were inspired in some way by the festival. Each film screened as a prelude to a feature film in the 2000 Toronto International Film Festival program. The full "Preludes" anthology was screened on the web in November 2000, and was given theatrical retrospectives at the TIFF Lightbox in the subsequent years.
David Cronenberg
Don McKellar
Patricia Rozema
Atom Egoyan
Jeremy Podeswa
Guy Maddin
Anne Wheeler
Michael Snow
Jean Pierre Lefebvre
Michael Jones
Casts & Crew
Also Directed by David Cronenberg
Johnny Smith is a schoolteacher with his whole life ahead of him but, after leaving his fiancee's home one night, is involved in a car crash which leaves him in a coma for 5 years. When he wakes, he discovers he has an ability to see into the past, present and future life of anyone with whom he comes into physical contact.
A psychiatrist and his needy patient discuss their relationship in a snow-covered field.
A short film produced for Canadian television.
A short documentary produced for Canadian public television.
A collection of six acclaimed short movies which have been screened at film festivals around the world.
Programme X is a 1970 TV show
A doctor must remove a parasite infestation from within a patient's breast.
A collective film of 33 shorts directed by different directors about their feeling about cinema.
Blank-faced bug killer Bill Lee and his dead-eyed wife, Joan, like to get high on Bill's pest poisons while lounging with Beat poet pals. After meeting the devilish Dr. Benway, Bill gets a drug made from a centipede. Upon indulging, he accidentally kills Joan, takes orders from his typewriter-turned-cockroach, ends up in a constantly mutating Mediterranean city and learns that his hip friends have published his work -- which he doesn't remember writing.
In 1960s China, French diplomat Rene Gallimard falls in love with an opera singer, Song Liling - but Song is not at all who Gallimard thinks.
Also Directed by Don McKellar
A small fishing village must procure a local doctor to secure a lucrative business contract. When unlikely candidate and big city doctor Paul Lewis lands in their lap for a trial residence, the townsfolk rally together to charm him into staying. As the doctor’s time in the village winds to a close, acting mayor Murray French has no choice but to pull out all the stops and begin The Grand Seduction.
Childstar is about an egotistical 12-year-old named Taylor Brandon Burns who has skyrocketed to fame at that young age. His relationship with his driver, Rick, takes a turn when Taylor confides in him about the problems of celebrity and the fears of his impending teenage years. When Taylor disappears with his new girlfriend, Rick attempts to find the boy and help him through this troubling period.
Ever more bizarre criteria are used to eliminate couples from a secret dance event.
Various citizens of Toronto anxiously await the end of the world, which is occurring at the stroke of midnight on New Year's Day.
The disappearance of a young Cree woman in Toronto traumatizes her Northern Ontario family, and sends her twin sister on a journey south to find her.
Don McKellar’s autobiographical, wryly comic short looks at Toronto International Film Festival–goers’ fierce desire to get into a screening.
New carpet factory footage intercut with old porn creates a brief but telling glimpse into the human psyche.
Also Directed by Patricia Rozema
In the not too distant future, two young women who live in a remote ancient forest discover the world around them is on the brink of an apocalypse. Informed only by rumor, they fight intruders, disease, loneliness & starvation.
The Hunger is a British/Canadian television horror anthology series, co-produced by Scott Free Productions, Telescene Film Group Productions and the Canadian pay-TV channel The Movie Network. Though it shares a title with the feature film The Hunger the series has no direct plot or character connection to the film, and was created by Jeff Fazio. Originally shown on the Sci Fi Channel in the UK, The Movie Network in Canada and Showtime in the US, the series was broadcast from 1997 to 2000, and is internally organized into two seasons. Each episode was based around an independent story introduced by the host; Terence Stamp hosted each episode for the first season, and was replaced in the second season by David Bowie. Stories tended to focus on themes of self-destructive desire and obsession, with a strong component of soft-core erotica; popular tropes for the stories included cannibalism, vampires, sex, and poison.
A festival is a concentration of hope. Audiences hungering for something startingly new, famously familiar or just plain "good". Actors hoping their well-conceived sincerity and ritual entrances have that special glow. Press and critics poised to love or hate lucidly. And proud, desperate filmmakers looking for that little blessing on their latest self-projection. All squeezing together for a few days, in a few rooms wondering whether this will truly be the perfect place at the perfect time. Of course, it rarely is. Mostly it's just a collection of almosts. Delicious, shared almosts.
Six stories about Montreal. 1: A young housewife from Toronto samples the nightlife using basic French. 2: The tale of a painting of Montreal's first mayor, Jacques Viger. 3: During a hockey game, Madeleine tries to tell Roger she wants a divorce after forty years of marriage. 4: A visitor to a conference on pictographs arrives at the airport, where the female customs officer steals a momento from each person. 5: As she is being driven to the hospital in an ambulance after an auto accident, Sarah recalls her life. 6: At a diplomatic reception, an older woman reminisces about her grand love in Montreal.
Norm, a confused young man, lives two lives, one in and one out of reality. One night, he witnesses the murder of rock video star Madelaine X and feels guilty, as he did nothing to prevent it. At Madelaine’s funeral, he meets a mysterious woman in black. Norm then gets a job at a news stand through a Cindy Lauper like girl called Zelda. They discuss the mystery around Madelaine’s death.
Awkward, shy and delightfully funny, Polly Vandersma is an "organizationally impaired" temporary assistant who finally gets her first permanent job at the age of 31. While she works for the curator of an art gallery, Polly narrates her own story, sharing the comical and bittersweet pretensions of the art world. At the same time, she reveals a special part of her own private world, taking the viewer to enchanted places in this quiet assault on the notion of authority everywhere.
Happy Days is an adaptation of Samuel Beckett's challenging absurdist drama, a play most would deem unfilmable. Faithfully adhering to Beckett's minimalist original, a black parody of love, marriage, and our search for meaning in an unfathomable universe, the piece consists of but two pathetic characters. One, wife Winnie, spends the duration of the drama half-buried in a pile of dirt; in true Beckett fashion, her predicament is never explained. The other character, husband Willie, is almost never seen. Dublin stage and screen veteran Rosaleen Linehan, in the lead, is exceptional as the trapped woman clinging to the empty, arbitrary routines and rituals of life, ever hopeful that 'this is going to be a happy day.
The Great Depression hits home for nine year old Kit Kittredge when her dad loses his business and leaves to find work. Oscar nominee Abigail Breslin stars as Kit, leading a splendid cast in the first ever "American Girl" theatrical movie. In order to keep their home, Kit and her mother must take in boarders - paying house - guests who turn out to be full of fascinating stories. When mother's lockbox containing all their money is stolen, Kit's new hobo friend Will is the prime suspect. Kit refuses to believe that Will would steal, and her efforts to sniff out the real story get her and friends into big trouble. The police say the robbery was an inside job, committed by someone they know. So if it wasn't Will, then who did it.
This fun and sexy comedy tells a timelessly entertaining story where wealthy, secret passions and mischievous women put love to the test.. When a spirited young woman, Fanny Price, is sent away to live on the great country estate of her rich cousins, she's meant to learn the ways of proper society. But while Fanny learns "their" ways, she also enlightens them with a wit and sparkle all her own!
A prudish woman working on tenure as a literacy professor at a large urban university finds herself attracted to a free-spirited, liberal woman who works at a local carnival.
Also Directed by Atom Egoyan
Egoyan juxtaposes home-video images of his son Arshile with a self-portrait of the famed Armenian artist, Arshile Gorky; Egoyan narrates in English, while his wife narrates in Armenian. The self-portrait made from a photo of the artist as a child at the time of the great massacre of the Armenians is used as a focus for meditations on the nature of self-awareness, artistic expression, and the relationship between the artist and the viewer.
An ambitious reporter probes the reasons behind the sudden split of a 1950s comedy team.
An anthology film following different stories around the theme of invisibility in the modern world.
With the aid of a fellow Auschwitz survivor and a hand-written letter, an elderly man with dementia goes in search of the person responsible for the death of his family.
A documentary about a journey to Beirut
An uptight insurance man and his film-censor wife become a kinky couple's landlords.
Made for the Venice Film Festival's 70th anniversary, seventy filmmakers made a short film between 60 and 90 seconds long on their interpretation of the future of cinema.
A man uses an instant photo booth with bizarre results.
Short telefilm.
Six stories about Montreal. 1: A young housewife from Toronto samples the nightlife using basic French. 2: The tale of a painting of Montreal's first mayor, Jacques Viger. 3: During a hockey game, Madeleine tries to tell Roger she wants a divorce after forty years of marriage. 4: A visitor to a conference on pictographs arrives at the airport, where the female customs officer steals a momento from each person. 5: As she is being driven to the hospital in an ambulance after an auto accident, Sarah recalls her life. 6: At a diplomatic reception, an older woman reminisces about her grand love in Montreal.
Also Directed by Jeremy Podeswa
Caleb Gare (Sam Shepard) is a farmer obsessed with owning as much land as he can and controlling his entire family. This becomes more complicated when a beautiful visiting teacher moves into the Gare home and she becomes involved in a battle of wills. To complicate matters more, a deep secret held by Caleb's wife will have to come to the surface. With the family at the breaking point, they must put aside their differences to bring in the year's harvest, after which they celebrate at the town's annual festival. Little does Caleb suspect that the one night of celebration will end in disaster, turmoil, and forever change the family.
A round of unerotic sexual couplings in Toronto, interspersed with interviews about an impending total eclipse.
Brash humor and genuine emotion make up this original series revolving around the lives, loves, ambitions, careers and friendships of a group of gay men and women living on Liberty Avenue in contemporary Pittsburgh, PA. The show offers an unapologetic look at modern, urban gay and lesbian lives while addressing the most critical health and political issues affecting the community. Sometimes racy, sometimes sensitive and always straight to the heart.
A child escapes from Poland during World War II and first heads to Greece before coming of age in Canada.
North of 60 is a mid-1990s Canadian television series depicting life in the sub-Arctic northern boreal forest. It first aired on CBC Television in 1992 and was syndicated around the world. It is set in the fictional community of Lynx River, a primarily Native-run town depicted as being in the Dehcho Region, Northwest Territories. Most of the characters were Dene. Some non-native characters had important roles: the restaurant/motel owner, the band manager, the nurse and the town's main RCMP officer. The show explored themes of Native poverty, alcoholism, cultural preservation and conflict over land settlements and natural resource exploitation. Originally somewhat light-hearted, it quickly became a more dramatic and ponderous series.
Three sets of tenants in a live/work building have daily lives and/or current stories acutely involving one or more of the five senses.
Performance artist/apartment cleaner David Roche looks at life and love as it impacts all the sexes.
The long-awaited sequel to Boys Briefs, the successful compilation of six outstanding short films about gay first love. Hosted by DANNY ROBERTS, star of MTV's THE REAL WORLD NEW ORLEANS. Films included are: Doors Cut Down (2000); Chicken (2001); Back Room (2000); Breakfast? (Frühstück?) (2002); Touch (2001); and Take-Out (2001)
"Touch" gives us a fractured narrative about a young teen who was imprisoned and sexually & physically abused by his captor for quite some time. How much isn't really clear, though the occasional flashbacks suggest that the abuser was a man who had been living with the boy and his mother.
Jeremy Podeswa’s voiceover-driven 24fps surveys the ways in which generations of one family can pass on their passion for cinema.
Also Directed by Guy Maddin
A story about an aging crime family patriarch.
An anthology film following different stories around the theme of invisibility in the modern world.
Maddin’s frequent collaborator Evan Johnson (who is co-director on The Forbidden Room) presents four visuals essays, ranging from one and a half to four minutes in length: Puberty, Colours, Elms, and Cold, each representing a visual exploration of a specific theme.
Guy Maddin directed this short biopic on the castrato known as the Manitoba Meadowlark, Dov Houle, who performed on tour with the film “Brand Upon the Brain!”
A tribute to Isabella Rossellini's father
Remix of previously unreleased material by Guy Maddin.
The Little White Cloud That Cried, made in tribute to underground filmmaker Jack Smith, and described as: “Goddesses unharnessing the power of the sea and putting it into a whole new element as they engaged in orgiastic battles and whoopla.” —cinematical.com
A woman with an oddly hairy belly gives birth to a pair of hands in Marie Losier’s giddily inventive "portrait" of filmmaker Guy Maddin, done as a collaboration between the two iconoclasts. A longtime fan of Maddin, Losier (best known for other inventive portraits of underground film icons like Tony Conrad and George Kuchar) hoped to document him as well; "I hate my voice and face," Maddin replied, and sent her Super-8 footage of his hands instead. Losier interwove the footage into her own distinct tale, shot like a surrealist 1920s silent film. A must for fans of Losier, Maddin and ingenious cinema in general, MANUELLE LABOR was completed for the Berlin Film Festival (where Maddin was the guest of honor). - Jason Sanders A collaboration film by Marie Losier and Guy Maddin. Two sisters, five brothers, a doctor and two nurses and the miraculous birth of a pair of hands, but whose hands?
Fact, fantasy and memory are woven seamlessly together in a personal portrait of filmmaker Guy Maddin's hometown of Winnipeg, Manitoba.
Guided by the spirit of “The Cuadecuc Manifesto” (coined by co-director Evan Johnson and inspired by Pere Portabella’s 1970 experimental cult documentary, Cuadecuc, vampir), Bring Me the Head of Tim Horton is a strange, stirring behind-the-scenes look at Paul Gross’s new feature, Hyena Road. Shot on location at CFB Shilo near Brandon, Manitoba, and in Aqaba, Jordan, the film mixes deep contrast black-and-white expressionism with wry and raw western revisionism reminiscent of Sam Peckinpah, as it summons unwieldy, psychedelic energy from the main event. [TIFF]
Also Directed by Anne Wheeler
Steve Austin is Dan Barnes, a former heavyweight boxer who hangs up his gloves to escape his violent lifestyle. Dans life is quickly turned upside down when the resident boxing champion makes his presence felt by dominating all opponents who stand in his way. In order to put the title holder in his place, Dan prepares an unseasoned newcomer for the biggest challenge of his life.
Sydney is a troubled teen heading for trouble. After being caught shoplifting and a case of alcohol poisoning, Sydney's desperate single mother sends her off to the country to live with her father, Ben, and his new pregnant wife, Emma. Sydney misses her boyfriend, her city life and doesn't get on with her dad or stepmom. Slowly she starts to settle in as she makes friends with Jess, a local girl whose mother died of cancer. Sydney makes a couple of mistakes but after her grandfather's death the extended family start to heal.
Ex-pro hockey player Matt Shade irrevocably changes his life when he teams up with fierce P.I. Angie Everett to form an unlikely investigative powerhouse.
A meddling man and woman determined to stop a wedding for the good of the bride and groom instead wind up falling in love with each other.
Lily and her three youngest children join her husband David Sutton, a doctor in an isolated northern Alberta town. Their eleven-year-old son arrives later from boarding school. David conceals a dark secret which caused the family to leave England without telling anybody. They befriend a neighbor Rosanne, who throws out her boyfriend after he beats her up in a bar. Lily, who is very English and out of place in the town, hires the half-Native Rosanne as a housekeeper, and eventually the two women become good friends, until the secret emerges again.
In this drama, Lesia convinces her English-Canadian friend Sarah to perform a Ukrainian dance with her as part of their school's Christmas pageant. Sarah's father, angry at the growing number of Ukrainian settlers, won't allow his daughter to participate. Despite the prejudices of their parents, the girls' friendship remains strong, and they meet in Sarah's barn to celebrate Christmas Day together. Part of the Adventures in History series.
Director Anne Wheeler joins actress Babz Chula on a trip to India to rid herself of cancer.
Not long after moving into her own place, Maggie finds herself with two unsolicited roommates: her recently divorced mother, Lila, and her young brother. The timing is especially bad, considering Maggie has fallen hard for an attractive woman, Kim, only hours before they move in. What could be a nonissue becomes increasingly complicated -- since Maggie's family is unaware of her sexual orientation, and Maggie is not open to sharing that information.
North of 60 is a mid-1990s Canadian television series depicting life in the sub-Arctic northern boreal forest. It first aired on CBC Television in 1992 and was syndicated around the world. It is set in the fictional community of Lynx River, a primarily Native-run town depicted as being in the Dehcho Region, Northwest Territories. Most of the characters were Dene. Some non-native characters had important roles: the restaurant/motel owner, the band manager, the nurse and the town's main RCMP officer. The show explored themes of Native poverty, alcoholism, cultural preservation and conflict over land settlements and natural resource exploitation. Originally somewhat light-hearted, it quickly became a more dramatic and ponderous series.
Declan Dunn has a fascination with mystical phenomena that began when he was buried under an avalanche and given up for dead. After he miraculously survived, he committed his life to investigating miracles and the absolute proof of their existence. Now a professor of Anthropology at a leading Oregon university, Declan has the training, support staff and the opportunity to study the uncanny, inexplicable phenomena people call "miracles". With the help of Peggy, a skeptical psychiatrist, and Miranda, a research student, the three embark on a quest to explain what science cannot.
Also Directed by Michael Snow
Playing painterly form with and against story-telling form, this Short Story is a loop that depicts a loop and is itself looped.
To Lavoisier Who Died in the Reign of Terror (1991) is a collaboration with filmmaker Carl Brown, who specializes in homebrewed chemical film development. In a series of tableaux, people perform everyday tasks — sleeping, dining, reading, card-playing — as the camera arcs past and over them (the replete set of positions recalls La région centrale’s movements). Brown abraded the film stock, creating a continuous dynamic surface-effect tension with the comparatively static views and cueing the soundtrack, the crackle of fire. The physics and chemistry of combustion were the scientific focus of Lavoisier, the 18th-century savant.
Described (rather cheekily) by director Michael Snow as a musical comedy, this deft probing of sound/image relationships is one of his wittiest, most entertaining and philosophically stimulating films. In his words, the film “derives its form and the nature of its possible effects from its being built from the inside, as it were, with the actual units of such a film, i.e. the frame and the recorded syllable. Thus its ‘dramatic’ element derives not only from a representation of what may involve us generally in life but from considerations of the nature of recorded speech in relation to moving light-images of people.’”
The apparent vertical scratch in celluloid that opens Presents literally opens into a film within the film. When its figure awakens into a woman in a 'real' unreal set, the slapstick satire of structural film begins. It is not the camera that moves, but the whole set, in this first of three material 'investigations' of camera movement. In the second, the camera literally invades the set; a plexiglass sheet in front of the dolly crushes everything in its sight as it zooms through space. Finally, this monster of formalism pushes through the wall of the set and the film cuts to a series of rapidly edited shots as the camera zigzags over lines of force and moving fields of vision in an approximation of the eye in nature. Snow pushes us into acceptance of present moments of vision, but the single drum beat that coincides with each edit in this elegaic section announces each moment of life's irreversible disappearance.
Experimental short where a camera turns over into a small apartment with a woman and a cat.
First shown on January 30, 1967, FOR LIFE AGAINST THE WAR was an open-call, collective statement from American independent filmmakers disparate in style and sensibility but united by their opposition to the Vietnam War. Part of the protest festival Week of the Angry Arts, the epic compilation film incorporated minute-long segments which were sent from many corners of the country, spliced together and projected. The original presentation of the works was more of an open forum with no curation or selection, and in 2000 Anthology Film Archives preserved a print featuring around 40 films from over 60 submissions.
Little Walk (1964)is Michael Snow’s first gallery film installation. It arrives as a diplomatic envoy from New York’s art and film worlds of the sixties – an alternative cinema informed by Minimalism and Happenings, materializations of art as experience projected on Snow’s trademark Walking Woman.
"Vanity. Had a beard. Appearance (looks). Looking. Disappearance act. Hand-made fades and zooms but camera made shave. Camerazor. Handsome. Tired. Walking Woman. My worst film."
Watch slides of Michael Snow's paintings from the worst seat in the house.
Zooming back from an image in close-up a brightly colored and kitschy room is revealed. Digitally manipulated objects and figures appear/disappear, details and colors change in scale, and intensity, sexes change. The Living Room digitally dramatizes and multiplies chosen manifestations and implications of On/Off and/or Absence/Presence. The Living Room is also part of the longer feature Corpus Collosum.
Also Directed by Jean Pierre Lefebvre
A group of young men train to be revolutionaries and plan an insurrection of the Canadian government.
After another cardiac arrest, Armand knows he don't have long to live. But after more then 70 years in the same house, he doesn't want to die somewhere other then home. His wife Rose has secretly decided she will die as she lived: with him.
A situationist fable centered around Roger Cantin as a young artisanal filmmaker looking to find solace by making pictures.
A carpenter is asked by his boss to serve as a guide for the new secretary, a young woman just arrived in Montreal from France. Both of their lives change as he shows her around the city.
A young man and his girlfriend visit his parents at their lake house for the weekend. While there, the couple meets an eccentric artist who comes between them.
Jean Pierre Lefebvre’s short comments on history and film’s role in it.
A 30-year old man is forced out of his inert and absent-minded existence when it's complicated by the three women in his life.
This plodding piece of cinematic ambiguity finds a married couple engaged in boring conversation in a window as scenery changes behind them. When they manage to talk about love, some of the tedium is lifted in the wake of their amorous verbiage. This black and white effort from Jean Pierre Lefebvre depends on symbolic impressionism rather than plot.
An unemployed man with individualist and pacifist values is inevitably brainwashed by society and the mass media to conform to the dominant ideology and embrace war. His soul is destroyed but his heart cannot be conquered.
The true identity of an undercover RCMP narcotics agent is discovered by the criminals he is investigating and his family pays the price.
Also Directed by Michael Jones
A graduate history student returns to her native Newfoundland, searching for proof of a conspiracy surrounding the referendum that saw Newfoundland join Canada.
Faustus is a clerk in the St. Johns, Newfoundland department of education. He dreams of becoming ruler of Newfoundland and staging a secession from Canada. Back in the real world, Faustus' boss Robert Joy plans to indoctrinate the citizenry of Newfoundland with a cultish geometric theory known as Total Education, but Joy may be foiled at any minute by the revelation of his earlier career as a flamenco dancer.
Mike Jones and his siblings Andy and Cathy travel by helicopter from rural Newfoundland to a gala to make speeches congratulating TIFF on its anniversary.