Sun, Nov 5, 2006
Claude Jutra was already one of Canada's notable directors when he made his best-loved work, a poignant portrait of growing up in a small Quebec mining town in the 1940s. His film is the story of Benoît, a young orphan who spends Christmas Eve with his undertaker uncle, Antoine, on a sleigh-bound journey through a bitter snowstorm to retrieve the body of a local boy. Drawing heavily from the French new wave filmmakers, Jutra's affecting slice-of-life tale is a bittersweet look at Quebec before the Quiet Revolution that focuses almost entirely on Benoît's nostalgic and sometimes absurd view of the townspeople. Though Jutra passed away in 1986, the film's history is traced by famed cinematographer Michel Brault, composer 'Jean Cousineau' and star Monique Mercure. Two residents of Black Lake, where the film was shot, are also interviewed alongside critics including Martin Knelman, Piers Handling and Andre Loiselle, who express the lasting impact of this undeniable classic of French-Canadian cinema.
Sun, Feb 10, 2008
The debut feature from Canada's most celebrated filmmaker, David Cronenberg, Shivers provided the young director with a crash course in feature filmmaking and established many of the unsettling themes explored in his later work. In the film, medical professor Dr. Hobbes (Fred Doederlein) creates a genetically-engineered organism he plans to use to bring about a more sensually aware society, but his experiments turn deadly when the aphrodisiac-producing parasite gets out of control and spreads throughout a swinging Montreal apartment complex. Despite the film's success on both sides of the border, the critical backlash against the film was used to launch a cultural attack on Canada's film funding. Since then, Shivers has outlasted its detractors and won over a significant cult following for its effective, low-budget chills and stark social allegories. Producers Ivan Reitman and John Dunning, stars Sue Helen Petrie, Paul Frampton, and makeup effects artist Joe Blasco (Members of the films cast and crew) are on hand to talk about the debut feature of Canada's most prolific and shocking auteur.