Peter Stebbings’ Empire of Dirt is something special. It’s the rare example of a Canadian film that’s able to balance universally relatable human problems while maintaining a cultural identity that makes it patently unique.
We talk with veteran director and photographer Gail Harvey about her latest film Looking is the Original Sin, which opens at the Carlton in Toronto this Friday alongside an exhibition at the theatre of photography from her decades long career.
The 14th annual environmentally minded Planet in Focus film festival kicks off today and runs through Sunday, and here's a look at some of the film's playing as a part of this year's line-up!
Emptying the Skies Based on a New Yorker essay by Jonathan Franzen, Emptying the Skies is a documentary about the poaching of migratory songbirds in the Middle East. The central figures of the film are a group of activists working to save these species of birds from potential extinction. The film fits in with other […]
Gringo Trails The narrative of Gringo Trails may wander like the backpackers it features for interview subjects, but the structure works to the film’s benefit, providing a cross-section of approaches to sustainable tourism that spans multiple continents. Opening with the tale of Yossi, a backpacker who, in the mid-1980s, was miraculously found by locals after […]
No Land, No Food, No Life Some documentaries guide, some illustrate, some shock, and others just tell you what’s going, and disappointingly No Land, No Food, No Life fits into that last category. Shot in Mali, Cambodia and Kampala, Uganda, the film depicts large corporations (both foreign and local) swooping in and seizing land from […]
A River Changes Course The minimalist documentary A River Changes Course quietly tackles globalization, deforestation, and over-fishing. Director Kalyanee Mam discreetly films three separate families struggling to assimilate past and present in Cambodia today. They barely survive in villages located in a remote (but dead) jungle in Northern Cambodia, on the Tonie Sap River and […]
Salmon Confidential Salmon Confidential portrays the government cover-up of what is killing BC’s wild salmon like a dramatic thriller set against an ecological backdrop, but it’s not as exciting as that logline might suggest. When biologist Alexandra Morton discovers salmon in BC are testing positive for dangerous European viruses, it sets off a chain of […]
Last Call (Closing Night Film) While it has become a hot button issue to talk about how human progress and potential might be doing more harm than good, it took 40 years for the world to finally listen to a group of devoted MIT researchers who tried telling this to everyone back in the 1970s. […]
Arctic Defenders (Opening Night Film) Borne from director John Walker’s lifelong love and his youthful infatuation with “Eskimo” culture and artwork, this disarmingly poignant look at First Nations families relocated decades earlier with hopes of establishing Canadian sovereignty in the literal Great White North balances the personal and the political with great and subtle dexterity. […]
We talk to actress and producer Jennifer Podemski and actress Cara Gee about their work on the First Nations family drama Empire of Dirt, applying the film's themes more broadly to a picture of small town living, the film’s sometimes subtle humour, why Peter Stebbings was chosen for such a project despite being a white male, and how the film fits into a current renaissance for First Nations cinema in Canada.
With a director more accustomed to shooting good looking and well handled action sequences, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire is just a slight notch better than its predecessor, but nearly every other positive and negative from the first film remains exactly the same.
Lots to go through this week on the home entertainment front including the coal in the stocking that is the Paul Rudd/Paul Giamatti team-up All is Bright, the Blu-Ray debut of the exceptional astronaut drama The Right Stuff, John Carpenter's ill fated TV pilot Body Bags, the toothless political drama The Attack, charming Irish creature feature Grabbers, the passable Dolph Lundgren/Randy Couture drug actioner Ambushed, and the gleefully sick Canadian sleaze flick, Junkie
Screening for free tonight at Double Double Land in Toronto - courtesy of MDFF filmmakers Kazik Radwanski and Dan Montgomery - the French coming of age drama My Blue-Eyed Kid takes a thoughtful and nuanced look at youthful obsessions and the fall out from divorce. Also, a few words about the Canadian mid-range feature Fogo and the short Stray, both of which take place in the Maritimes and play as part of the evening's programming.
With a whole lot of catching up still to be done, our film and arts editor gives brief reviews of the Calvin and Hobbes documentary Dear Mr. Watterson and the teen drama Geography Club, and tells you where to check out his reviews of the British dystopian drama How I Live Now and the WWII fable The Book Thief.
