Atom Egoyan
Veronica wants to remain in jail for a sexual assault she knows she's been wrongfully indicted for. She and her father, Jim, find themselves acting out of the bounds of good behavior as the past haunts them.
Based on a stage play of the same name by Amy Nostbakken and Norah Sadava, the story follows Cassandra as she tries to organize the affairs for her mother’s funeral.
The story of Italian cinema under Fascism, a sophisticated film industry built around the founding of the Cinecittà studios and the successful birth of a domestic star system, populated by very peculiar artists among whom stood out several beautiful, magnetic, special actresses; a dark story of war, drugs, sex, censorship and tragedy.
Sculpting Memory places Atom Egoyan in an audiovisual environment woven from the fabric of his own films―a conceptual move that references Egoyan’s adaptation of Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape while evoking Egoyan’s own work as a moving-image installation artist and his concern with the recording and displaying of images.
Eight years after the disappearance of Cassandra, some disturbing incidents seem to indicate that she's still alive. Police, parents and Cassandra herself, will try to unravel the mystery of her disappearance.
550 artists were interviewed over ten years. At some point during those interviews, they were asked a question and told to answer with one word only. Some stuck to one, some said more, some answered quickly, some thought it through, and some didn't answer at all. That question… Lennon or McCartney?
Home video changed the world. The cultural and historical impact of the VHS tape was enormous. This film traces the ripples of that impact by examining the myriad aspects of society that were altered by the creation of videotape.
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.
The savage murders of three young children sparks a controversial trial of three teenagers accused of killing the kids as part of a satanic ritual.
Canadian actress and filmmaker Sarah Polley investigates certain secrets related to her mother, interviewing a group of family members and friends whose reliability varies depending of their implication in the events, which are remembered in different ways; so a trail of questions remains to be answered, because memory is always changing and the discovery of truth often depends on who is telling the tale.
Follows the first year of business for Alex, Charlie, and Nigel as they try to make their theatre, The Toronto Underground Cinema, a success in the dying world of repertory cinema. The film also places the cinema in context to the larger world of rep. Featuring interviews with theatres such as Film Forum in NYC, The Alamo Drafthouse in Austin, and The New Beverly Cinema in L.A., and celebrities such as Kevin Smith, John Waters, Atom Egoyan, and George A. Romero, the world of repertory cinema will come alive as a vibrant and culturally significant medium that needs to be preserved
An anthology film following different stories around the theme of invisibility in the modern world.
The picaresque and touching story of the politically incorrect, fully lived life of the impulsive, irascible and fearlessly blunt Barney Panofsky.
It Came from Kuchar is the definitive, feature documentary about the legendary, underground filmmaking twins, the Kuchar brothers. George and Mike Kuchar have inspired two generations of filmmakers, actors, musicians, and artists with their zany, "no budget" films and with their uniquely enchanting spirits.
A collective film of 33 shorts directed by different directors about their feeling about cinema.
Created for the To Each His Own Cinema (Chacun son cinéma) anthology film commissioned for the 60th anniversary of the Cannes Film Festival, Artaud Double Bill showcases a wry critique of the evolving role of traditional cinema in the hands of the millennial generation. The Armenian – Canadian director Atom Egoyan crafted a painfully true examination of the impact cinema has had on the hearts and minds of today’s youth.
Kirby Dick's provocative documentary investigates the secretive and inconsistent process by which the Motion Picture Association of America rates films, revealing the organization's underhanded efforts to control culture. Dick questions whether certain studios get preferential treatment and exposes the discrepancies in how the MPAA views sex and violence.
An ambitious reporter probes the reasons behind the sudden split of a 1950s comedy team.
This compelling documentary explores Canadian film culture and tries to discover what defines Canadian film through interviews with notable filmmakers.
In Depression-era Winnipeg, a legless beer baroness hosts a contest for the saddest music in the world, offering a grand prize of $25,000.
Filmmaker Peter Mettler embarks on a mission that takes him around the world. He is determined to record the diverse modes of transcendence that people in different cultures adopt in order to live life to the fullest. As he traverses civilization and wilderness and encounters a range of lifestyles and ideas, the filmmaker's mind-expanding trip around the world grows into a poem of images and sounds, reflecting the fragmented but alluring worlds it attempts to capture.
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.
In Krapp's Last Tape, which was written in English in 1958, an old man reviews his life and assesses his predicament. We learn about him not from the 69-year-old man on stage, but from his 39-year-old self on the tape he chooses to listen to. On the 'awful occasion' of his birthday, Krapp was then and is now in the habit of reviewing the past year and 'separating the grain from the husks'. He isolates memories of value, fertility and nourishment to set against creeping death 'when all my dust has settled'.
A solitary middle-aged bachelor and a naive Irish teenager transform one another's lives to arrive at a place of recognition, redemption and wisdom in Atom Egoyan's adaptation of William Trevor's celebrated 1994 novel. Seventeen and pregnant, Felicia travels to England in search of her lover and is found instead by Joseph Ambrose Hilditch, a helpful catering manager whose kindness masks a serial killer. Hilditch has murdered several young women, but he has no conscious awareness of the crimes; like Felicia, he doesn't see his true self. Felicia's Journey is a story of innocence lost and regained: Felicia awakens to the world's dangers and duplicities; and Hilditch, who grew up lonely and unloved, comes to realize what was taken from him, and what he himself has taken.
Documentary about the films of Atom Egoyan.
A small mountain community in Canada is devastated when a school bus accident leaves more than a dozen of its children dead. A big-city lawyer arrives to help the survivors' and victims' families prepare a class-action suit, but his efforts only seem to push the townspeople further apart. At the same time, one teenage survivor of the accident has to reckon with the loss of innocence brought about by a different kind of damage.
An incredibly dull-witted family unknowingly stumble upon an illegal weapons deal while on the trail of their "stolen" garbage.
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.
Michael Almereyda discussing the future of film with various directors at Sundance.
In the upscale Toronto strip club Exotica, dancer Christina is visited nightly by the obsessive Francis, a depressed tax auditor. Her ex-boyfriend, the club's MC, Eric, still jealously pines for her even as he introduces her onstage, but Eric is having his own relationship problems with the club's female owner. Thomas, a mysterious pet-shop owner, is about to become unexpectedly involved in their lives.
A look into the life of troubled former hockey player Brian Spencer, who got into problems both on the ice and off because of his temper. The film also has a close focus on Spencer's father, and shows how he influenced Brian's life both before and after his death.
An uptight insurance man and his film-censor wife become a kinky couple's landlords.
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.
A visitor to a conference in Montreal arrives at the airport and has a strange experience with the customs officer. Short film written and directed by Atom Egoyan, as part of the Montreal vu par... anthology.
A struggling actor's job as a hotel custodian is a front for his real job: being rented out as a gigolo by his supervisor. A co-worker is obsessed with him, but he ignores and avoids her. He leaves his acting resume in the hotel room of a screenwriter, who is casting for a TV movie based on the true story of her deceased brother. She hires him to play the lead and the two begin an affair. She becomes increasingly distraught as it becomes evident that the movie's producer is changing her story. Egoyan's trademark tangle of bizarre relationships surrounds the protagonists on their way to a mind-blowing conclusion.
An emotionally constrained view of the displacement of human feelings in our video saturated society. Van regularly visits his grandmother in a run-down nursing home. His father depends on phone sex for guidance meanwhile erasing family homevideos of happier times with homemade pornography. Will Van rescue his grandmother and memories of his mother in time?
In a playground an oriental dancer recites the poem Men by Gail Harris.
Twenty-three-year old Peter Foster is an only child who lives at home, where he constantly hears his parents arguing. Because Peter does nothing all day, the family goes to a clinic where a therapist videotapes them. After Peter watches his tape, he views the tape of a troubled Armenian family, who gave their only son away for adoption when they arrived in Canada. Peter decides to visit this family, and he pretends to be their son, Bedros Deryan. The Deryan family welcomes him with open arms, and Peter tries to patch up the poor relationship between George Deryan and his daughter Azah. Written by Will Gilbert
An odd young real estate agent shows a couple an older house that has seen better days.
An old man reluctantly attends his retirement party, which consists of a six minute taped conversation in an empty room.
Several love stories set in one of the most interesting new cities in the world, Rotterdam.
Calendar will be followed by the medium-length Notes For A Possible Sequel, a work-in-progress wherein Egoyan re-assembles the original cast and looks at how the intervening years have treated the characters, while ruminating on some of his essential themes including heritage and the aesthetic impact of technological change.
